The invention discloses a shallow soil landslide early warning method based on a digital topographic map, which belongs to the field of landslide prevention and control engineering, and is characterized by comprising the following steps of: a, connecting a straight line with middle points protruding upwards along a contour line of the topographic map to serve as a middle line; b, determining an intermediate point; c, forming three point groups of plane curvature; d, taking the arithmetic mean value of the gradient as the gradient alpha of the landslide mass; e, according to a terrain DEM data distribution principle, assignments of all points in each grid are the same; f, taking an arithmetic mean value; g, calculating a topographic factor T of the potential landslide mass; h, calculating a rainfall factor R; i, calculating a shallow soil landslide early warning judgment value P; and j, performing early warning according to the shallow soil landslide early warning judgment value P. According to the method, the shallow soil landslide can be pre-warned without a large amount of historical observation data of the landslide, the dangerous landslide body is determined in advance, and the disaster prevention applicability and the pre-warning efficiency are greatly improved.