Conducted a deep research on the high order single step method for pseudodynamic tests and analyzed the error propagation effect of the method. By introducing the structural stiffness variation coefficient of system researched the stability and damping characteristics of the method for nonlinear system and based on the work further analyzed the influence on the system error propagation effect by the stiffness variation coefficient and the parameter β. Furthermore, a numerical example was taken to verify our analysis results. The high order single step method has good adaptability for nonlinear system and can effectively control the cumulative error when the structural stiffness of system is changing, meanwhile, the error propagation effect in the nonlinear system can be further mitigated by appropriately adjusting the parameter β.