Abstract In normal practice, the active earth pressure on cantilever retaining wall is evaluated with different procedures relating to an ideal vertical plane passing through the heel of the wall. If the wall presents a long heel, failure planes do not interfere with the vertical stem, so that the limit Rankine conditions can develop freely in the backfill. The inclination of lateral actions along the ideal plane is assumed to be constant and depends on the geometry of the ground level and on the friction angle φ. The Authors recently proposed a new method to evaluate the active earth pressure coefficient due to seismic loading with a pseudo-static stress plasticity solution. The present paper describes the application of this method to a retaining wall supporting a φ soil backfill with an irregular surface. For two different configurations of wall-soil system, the behaviour is also studied by continuum FDM dynamic analyses, utilising four Italian accelerometric time-histories scaled at the same peak ground acceleration. The comparison between different procedures is also analysed.