In order to study thediffer ence of several most commonly used active earth-pres sure theories， with horizontal cohesive soil for example， compared and analyzed the distri-bution and value tendency of earth pressure of these three theories， and analyzed the stress distribution of retaining walls by finite element method.A method is used in solving process for horizontal layer element method， which used interpolation derivation formula to solve the most unfavorable fracture angle θ The results show that the distribution of horizontal layer element method is close to measured value.Meanwhile， some important parameters effect the stability of retaining walls tally with the measured value， which indicate that hori-zontal layer element method is more practical.