Abstract: The traditional theories of earth pressure for retaining walls are based on the limit equilibrium. They incorrectly assume that the earth pressure is independent of the stress state in the soil around the wall. Although they point out that the earth pressure is closely related to the soil deformation, nothing about the computation of it has been done. In this paper a new method for the calculation of the earth pressure based on the stress analyzed by FEM is proposed, The weakness of the traditional theories can be overcome in the new method.