Aiming at the problems such as poor effect of water and nutrient retention, instability and leakage in barren gravel land at the northern foot of Qinling Mountain, raw soil in Shaanxi Province was chosen as the tested soil to study the characteristics of water and nutrient leakage in topsoil with different structure. By filling the soil column hierarchically with different bulk density, five kinds of topsoil structure were set to analyze the leakage characteristics of water and nutrient in the artificial plough layer. The results showed that: (1) The initial leakage ability and the attenuation degree showed a negative correlation relationship with the underlying soil bulk density, and the infiltration process could be simulated by the modified Kostiakov infiltration empirical formula; (2) The underlying soil bulk density greatly affected the cumulative amount of leakage, water leakage rate and nutrient loss amount, and they showed negative correlation relationships; (3) From the perspective of the total nutrients leakage amount, there was an optimal structure of topsoil, which had the best effect of retaining fertilizer. By analyzing the leakage of water and nutrient comprehensively, the optimal structure of topsoil was that the bulk densities of the soil layers from the bottom to up were 1.5, 1.3 and 1.2 g/cm3, respectively.