The invention relates to the technical field of organic synthesis, and in particular relates to a method for synthesizing sec-butyl alcohol. The method comprises the following steps: firstly, performing addition reaction to synthesize sec-butyl propionate from an n-butene raw material and propionic acid, and secondly, performing hydrolysis reaction on sec-butyl propionate, thereby obtaining a target product sec-butyl alcohol. According to the method, under specific reaction conditions, with the combination of addition reaction and hydrolysis reaction, n-butyl alcohol is synthesized in a roundabout mode, the reaction condition is gentle, the reaction selectivity is high, the conversion rate is high, products are easy to separate and purify, the requirement on the content of n-butene in the n-butene raw material is low, and when the content of n-butene is 20wt%, the conversion rate of propionic acid can be up to 70.5%, and the selectivity is as high as 98.7%. By adopting the method, the yield of sec-butyl alcohol can be increased to be 47.1% from 10% of a catalytic hydration method, the yield is greatly increased, and thus the method can be used in industrialization production.