Accompanying with the increasingly serious environmental problems, the demand for remediation of contaminated soil becomes more and more urgent, and the application of surface active agent to treat contaminated soil has been widely studied. The adsorption and desorption behavior, solubilization ability and toxicity of surfactants are the key factors for the treatment of soil pollution. In this paper, application of ionic, non-ionic, compound surfactant system and biosurfactant in the treatment of soil heavy metal pollution, organic pollution and soil heavy metal compound pollution have been introduced. The factors affecting the treatment effect of surface active agent have been summarized, and the defects of these methods have been discussed. Pollution control has been introduced from three aspects, they are migration, transformation and degradation of pollutants, treatment process and combined treatment technologies.