A method for determining 9 heavy metal elements in soil and sediment was developed by using microwave digestion-ICP-MS. The mixture of HNO3-H2O2-HF was found to give the best digestion results for soil and sediment of samples. Under the optimized conditions, the samples were analyzed by ICP-MS with the triple internal standard elements Ge, In and Bi. The results showed that all their correlation coefficients were over 0.999. The national standard soil referenee material (ESS-1 GSBZ50011-88) was analyzed by the described method and the results were accorded with the reference values. The measurement precision range was from 0.48％ to 5.73％ in terms of relative standard deviation.The recoveries and the limits of detection were in the ranges of 98.0％ to 100.7％ and 0.011 to 0.328 μg·L-1 respectively, and 11 sediment samples were determined by the proposed method. It was indicated that the method was reliable for determining heavy metal elements in soil and sediment samples.