Abstract: It is indicated that soil has viscoelastic properties, thus, in order to forecast the settlement of the ground accurately, the constitutive model of soil must be established properly. Fractional derivative viscoelastic model, which has higher precision and needs less experimental parameters, can be applied to model the soil behavior. This paper investigates the settlement of semi-infinite viscoelastic ground subjected to a vertical concentrated load with the fractional derivative viscoelastic model. It is shown that the settlement of the semi-infinite viscoelastic ground with the fractional derivative viscoelastic model is less than that with the classic viscoelastic model. And the effect of the concentrated load on the surrounding settlement of the ground and the creep behavior can not be described properly by the classic viscoelastic model.