According to the existing investigation of seismic slope failure, tension cracks occur easily at the top of the slope which seriously affects the stability of the slope.However, the traditional stability analysis of seismic slope seldom considers tension cracks caused by soil fracture.In this paper, the equilibrium equation of force and moment is established based on the limit equilibrium-pseudo static method.The critical failure surface and its corresponding normal stress distribution are obtained by variational method.A closed form solution for the yield acceleration of seismic slope considering tension cracks is established without soil tensile strength.The study shows that tensile cracks will significantly reduce the stability of seismic slope and it reaches 50% for the vertical slope; The yield acceleration caused by the downward vertical seismic force is smaller when the slope inclination is bigger; In contrast, the upward vertical seismic force makes the yield acceleration smaller.