Abstract: In traditional methods for the critical load, the soil above load working plane is treated as surcharge, which does not consider influence of embedded depth on subsidiary stress distribution or the variation of coefficient of earth pressure at rest on self-weight stress. Based on the subsidiary stress formula of embedded distributed load and considering that the coefficient of earth pressure at rest varies with internal friction angle of ground material, the critical load of ground is investigated. The calculated results indicate that the critical load is overestimated if the coefficient of earth pressure at rest equals 1, and that the variation of lateral earth pressure can not be neglected. The subsidiary stress in ground significantly reduces and the critical load increases by a large margin after the influence of load embedded depth is considered. The vertical subsidiary stress is reduced by 29.3% at most and the critical load increases by 38.4%～44.6% when the load embedded depth equals the load distributed width. The effect of load embedded depth on the critical load is nonlinear, and the influence of load embedded depth decreases with the increase of depth.