Purpose <p>As highways and railroads pass through rural residential areas, the vibration of ramming construction lead to frequent accidents in housing projects. In order to approach this issue, a new calculation method for evaluating the range of vibration response of ramming machine on uneven and unsaturated soil site is proposed.</p> Methods <p>The study takes into account the weight of the rammer, the lifting height and the ramming depth. Heaviside function is introduced to realize the accurate coupling between the impact force and the contact surface. In addition, the non-uniform variation of multiple physical parameters with depth is especially considered, and the vibration control equation of non-uniform unsaturated soil is established. Through the Hankel transformation, the time-domain problem is transformed into a frequency-domain problem, and the analytical solution is given to analyze the vibration characteristics of the actual non-uniform unsaturated soil site under the action of ramming.</p> Results <p>The calculated values for the non-uniform unsaturated soil layer were generally greater than the calculated values for the uniform unsaturated soil layer. The study found that the vibration was obvious and strong within the impact area (35 m) of the ramming construction.</p> Conclusion <p>The model can more accurately reflect the vibration situation in actual engineering compared with the traditional uniform unsaturated model.</p>