Maintaining an appropriate soil available phosphorus (P) level is vital to ensure vegetable production and water safety. The significant feature of the current vegetable production system’s phosphate fertilizer input is massive and frequency, which causes a large amount of P accumulated in the soil, further, increasing the movement of P and causing environmental risks. It is generally believed that soil P environmental threshold of vegetable fields is higher than that of farmland, however, the irrigation and phosphate fertilizer application of vegetable fields were much higher than those of farmland. Therefore, P is still easier to loss from vegetable fields than farmland. Results of literature investigation showed that, environmental thresholds of vegetable fields varied among different regions in our country, mainly within P 60.0 – 80.0 mg/kg. The available P contents in vegetable fields were usually higher than their environmental thresholds, while the available P contents in croplands were usually lower than their environmental thresholds, which meant the vegetable fields had higher environmental risks than croplands. Furthermore, we found that there was a common phenomenon that the agriculture threshold of vegetable P is higher than that of cereal crops, reflecting high P requirement of vegetables. Therefore, only reducing the amount of phosphate fertilizer to mitigate the risk of P loss in vegetable fields might lead to vegetable production decline. Accordingly, on the basis of understanding the current status and characteristics of P accumulation in vegetable fields, and clarifying the agriculture and environmental threshold of soil available P for high vegetable yield and sustainable development of vegetable production, soil available P can be maintained at a level that meet the high-yield demand of vegetable plants and low P loss by optimizing the amount of P, thus achieving the best P management in vegetable fields.