A new set of exact coherent states in the form of a travelling wave is reported in plane channel flow. They are continued over a range in Re from approximately 2600 up to 30 000, an order of magnitude higher than those discovered in the transitional regime. This particular type of exact coherent states is found to be gradually more localised in the near-wall region on increasing the Reynolds number. As larger spanwise sizes L + z are considered, these exact coherent states appear via a saddle-node bifurcation with a spanwise size of L + z ' 50 and their phase speed is found to be c + ' 11 at all the Reynolds numbers considered. Computation of the eigenspectra shows that the time scale of the exact coherent states is given by h/Ucl in channel flow at all Reynolds numbers, and it becomes equivalent to the viscous inner time scale for the exact coherent states in the limit of Re → ∞. The exact coherent states at several different spanwise sizes are further continued to a higher Reynolds number, Re = 55 000, using the eddy-viscosity approach (Hwang & Cossu, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 105, 2010, 044505). It is found that the continued exact coherent states at different sizes are self-similar at the given Reynolds number. These observations suggest that, on increasing Reynolds number, new sets of self-sustaining coherent structures are born in the near-wall region. Near this onset, these structures scale in inner units, forming the near-wall self-sustaining structures. With further increase of Reynolds number, the structures that emerged at lower Reynolds numbers subsequently evolve into the self-sustaining structures in the logarithmic region at different length scales, forming a hierarchy of self-similar coherent structures as hypothesised by Townsend (i.e. attached eddy hypothesis). Finally, the energetics of turbulent flow is discussed for a consistent extension of these dynamical systems notions to high Reynolds numbers.