Abstract: Typically, the minimum safety factor is used to evaluate the stability of slopes, which is recommended by many specifications. In fact, the maximum acceleration can also have this capacity and act as an alternative index. The safety factor reflects the reserve in strength of the slope, while the acceleration reflects the reserve in kinematics, i.e., to investigate the current state and sliding state of the slope from the kinematics point of view. In this paper, cohesionless soil slope and cohesive soil slope are analyzed to investigate the main influencing factors of acceleration, and the relationship between the minimum safety factor and the maximum acceleration. Results show that the correlation between the safety factor and the acceleration is more significant when cohesion has smaller weight in shear strength of the soil.