The surface sediments are the source and sink of many pollutants of water. Studies have shown that phosphorus and other nutrient elements in surface sediments of Taihu Lake area, specially in Meiliang Bay and East Taihu Lake, are seriously polluted.SMT method (Standards Measurements and Testing) and molybdenum antimony anti-spectrophotometry were used to pretreat and analyze phosphorus of the 18 surface sediment samples in Taihu Lake, China, and the total phosphorus pollution was evaluated in comparison with the standards of China, Canada and the United States, respectively. Moreover, the adsorption and desorption kinetics equations were established by linear fitting, the adsorption characteristics of phosphorus under different pH and soil/water ratio were obtained. And we also studied the desorption characteristics of phosphorus under different temperature and pH conditions. The results showed that the highest contents of total phosphorus, inorganic phosphorus, organic phosphorus and acid phosphorus all appeared in S9 sampling sites, the highest content of alkali phosphorus was found in S11 sampling site. For all sampling sites, the order of average contentof each fraction phosphorus was (μg·g-1): inorganic phosphorus (40143)>acid phosphorus (37781)>organic phosphorus (17537)>alkali phosphorus (2553). The results of pollution evaluation showed that except for S12， S14~S16 and S18, other sampling sites suffered varying degrees of contamination. Both adsorption and desorption processes of phosphorus on the surface sediments followed the pseudo-second-order kinetics equation. The optimum soil/water ratio was 25∶1. The pH had different effects on adsorption and desorption, respectively. The results provided not only a theoretical basis for governing the phosphorus pollution but also credible experimental data for studying the migration of phosphorus at the sediment-water interface in Meiliang Bay and Taihu Lake.