Abstract: In view of complicated stress in pre-driving recovery gateway at fully mechanized caving face of extra-thick coal seam, the method of numerical simulation was used to analyze the stress evolution laws, and the results indicate that stress shows a increasing trend in the pillars between the pre-driving retracement gateway and working face, and the stress in channel side retracement pillar is significantly affected by the working face when the clean coal pillar width is around 35 m; the stress variation closely associated with stability of coal pillar at the last mining stage. At maximum stress, the pillar at last mining stage is completely yield and destroyed when the clean coal pillar width is around 5 m. Field application results show that the deformation of the pre-driving retracement gateway gradually increases when the clean coal pillar width is at around 40 m, and shrinkage of which is maximized when the clean coal pillar width is at around 7 m. The in-situ deformation monitoring results of the pre-driving retracement gateway has the same trend with the numerical results.