[Background] This work is for screening and evaluating the remediation effect of lignite- based materials on cadmium pollution, and for reducing cadmium flux into the ground water through vertical infiltration or to large water and soil area by surface runoff pollution. [Methods] The soil samples were from 200 m surroundings of a lead metallurgical factory at 0 - 20 cm depth contaminated with heavy metals. The lignite from Zhaotong city of Yunnan was modified to be alkalization, calcium- loaded, nitrified, humic acid, demineralization, activated carbon, and ulphonated ones, and the 3% of each of them was evenly mixed with contaminated soil and incubated for 120 days. The organo-mineral complexes ( G0: water-dispersing complex, G1: NaCl-dispersing complex, and G2: NaCl-grinding- dispersing complex) were extracted, and the determination of cadmium content was conducted by Tessier sequential extraction method, flame atomic absorption spectrophotometer determination; soil physical and chemical properties were determined by Lu Rukun method. Microsoft Excel 2007, SPSS 20.0 and Graphpad Prism 5.0 were used to process and analyze the acquired data and Duncan忆s method for ANOVA. [Results] 1) The content distribution of ion exchange, carbonate-bound, Fe-Mn-oxide-bound cadmium in the complexes was as G0 > G1 > G2 in all ameliorator treatments, however, the content distributions of organics-weakly-bound and organics-strongly-bound cadmium were in opposite order. Residual Cd in G0 complex had no significant differences with that in G1 and G2 complex except for calcification lignite. 2) The application of lignite-based materials generally increased the organics- weakly-bound cadmium content of soil, compared with raw polluted soil. And mainly the organics- weakly-bound Cd in the water-stable complexes increased, i. e. , in the complex G0, G1 and G2 by 5.27%, 20.74% and 17.82% compared to the control, respectively. The use of lignite, nitrified lignite, and humic acid significantly resulted in the increase of organics-strongly-bound Cd content in water-stable complex by the average value of 27.26%, 23.90% and 40.05% respectively, and significantly reducing the content of exchangeable and carbonate fractions content in water-stable complex in the range of 14.63% -22.79% and 14.31% -34.56%. Residual fraction was slightly improved by lignite, nitrified lignite and humic acid than other treatments. The nitrified lignite and humic acid remarkably decreased the content of Fe-Mn-oxide-bound Cd, and alkalization, calcium-loaded, lignite, demineralization, sulphonated and activated carbon increased the content of Fe-Mn-oxide-bound fraction. Alkalization, calcification, demineralization and activated carbon presented no obvious effect on the exchangeable Cd. 3) Modified lignite mainly improved the content of exchangeable and carbonate-bound Cd. In addition to the humic acid, modified lignite generally reduced the soil organics-weakly-bound and organics-strongly-bound Cd content compared with that before modification, and residual fraction content showed a trend of transformation to the available form. [Conclusions] In short, non-water-stable complexes contain mainly ion exchangeable and carbonate-bound fraction, water-stable complex is mainly composed of organics-bound and residual form. Some lignite-based materials could change Cd availability to unavailable speciation by inactivation or immobilization. In general, modified lignite mostly weakened the passivation or immobilization effect.