The invention relates to a method for recycling valuable metal from a waste nickel-cobalt-manganese lithium ion battery. The method comprises the following steps of: dismounting, discharging and crushing the battery, soaking crushed waste nickel-cobalt-manganese lithium ions into sulfuric acid with certain concentration, adding a reducing agent to strip positive and negative pole pieces, and leaching valuable metals of nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium; and replacing leach liquor with iron powder to remove copper, carrying out hydrolyzing to remove iron and aluminum, and dosing an impurity-removed solution to synthesize an aluminum coated nickel, cobalt and manganese ternary positive electrode material precursor, evaporating and concentrating the synthesized solution, adding carbonateor introducing carbon dioxide to recycle lithium. According to the method disclosed by the invention, stripping and leaching are synchronously completed, chemical precipitation is performed to removecopper, iron and aluminum, slag amount is small, slag filter performances are good, and the impurity-removed solution is used for synthesizing the aluminum coated nickel, cobalt and manganese ternaryprecursor, so that the recovery rate of valuable metal is increased; and the recovery rate for nickel, cobalt and manganese is 96% or higher in the whole process, the total recovery rate of lithium is90% or higher, the technological process is short, operation is simple, equipment is less, and the cost is low.