Abstract: To study the problem of leaving a narrow coal pillar under the conditions of high soft rock, the mining of 2^# coal seam in Shuguang Mine is taken as the engineering background. Using the methods of theoretical analysis, numerical calculation, we obtained a certain method of reasonable width of narrow coal pillars along an empty roadway with external-misaligned stagger arrangement, which considers four aspects for the pillar width from distribution laws of lateral support stress in upper goaf, the theoretical calculation of coal pillar width in retaining roadway, vertical stress and plastic zone distribution of coal pillar. Theoretical calculations show that the fracture zone is 3.35 m and the plastic zone is 5.76 m and the numerical simulation shows that the reasonable retention width of the coal pillar is 3.37 to 5.13 m. The numerical analysis of the surrounding rock stress distribution of the roadway under different coal pillar widths shows that when the coal pillar width is 4 m, the surrounding rock deformation of the roadway is small.