This study aimed to investigate whether pre-curing the universal adhesives affect the resin bonding to zirconia ceramic. Two commercial universal adhesives (All-Bond Universal, ABU; Single Bond Universal Adhesive, SBU) were tested in comparison with a conventional zirconia primer (Z-Prime Plus, ZPP). Air-abraded zirconia specimens were divided into six groups, to which different priming agents were applied with or without photo-polymerization. After resin cylinders were built on the primed zirconia surface using a resin cement (Duo-Link), all bonded specimens were stored in water at 37℃ for 24 hours and half of them (n = 12) were additionally thermocycled 5,000 times. A shear bond strength test was performed at a crosshead speed of 0.5 mm/minute and failure modes were assessed using an optical microscope at 25× magnification. Before thermocycling, the light-cured specimens of ABU and SBU showed higher bond strengths than the uncured ones of the materials (p<0.05), whereas no significant difference was found between the pre-cured and uncured specimens of ZPP (p > 0.05). After thermal aging, there were significant decreases in the bond strength for all specimens treated with the universal adhesives (p<0.05). However, ZPP produced no significant difference after aging (p > 0.05) and attained higher bond strength values for both the pre-cured and uncured specimens when compared to the two universal adhesives (p<0.05). Adhesive failures were predominant in all test groups and thermocycling resulted in the higher incidences of adhesive failures for the uncured groups, which was not shown in the pre-cured groups.