<p>Counterweight walls are widely used in road and railway embankment engineering. This study focuses on a counterweight wall with a polyline back, and analytically compares the active earth pressure under three movement modes: translation (TM), rotation about the toe (RT), and rotation about the heel (RH). The analysis is based on two critical slip surfaces within the backfill. The minimum factors of safety for overall sliding, overturning, and foundation bearing capacity are adopted as objective variables to determine the active earth pressure for each movement mode. Validation against experimental and numerical data shows good agreement, with an average error of approximately 15%. Among the three modes, TM and RT are possibly more capable of mobilizing the backfill into the active limit state than RH, which benefits from the consistent resisting effect of the foundation. The horizontal and vertical components of the resultant earth pressure are sometimes maximized under RT. Additionally, the earth pressures on the entire wall and the overall stability under TM and RH are closely related to foundation bearing capacity; a lower bearing capacity notably affects both stability and earth pressure. As the bearing capacity increases, the factor of safety under TM exhibits a nonlinear decrease to some extent. In certain cases, a two-segment polyline slip surface may serve as an optimized alternative to the overall critical slip surface. The proposed method provides a practical tool for identifying adverse conditions and supporting the safe and reliable designs of counterweight walls.</p>