The combined effects of the rate-dependent behavior of both the backfill soil and the geosynthetic reinforcement have been investigated, which should be attributed to the viscous property of material. A nonlinear finite element method (FEM) analysis procedure based on the Dynamic Relaxation method was developed for the geosynthetic-reinforced soil retaining wall (GRS-RW). In the numerical analysis, both the viscous properties of the backfill and the reinforcement were considered through the unified nonlinear three-component elastic-viscoplastic model. The FEM procedure was validated against a physical model test on geosynthetic-reinforced soil retaining wall with granular backfill. Extensive finite-element analyses were carried out to investigate the tensile force distributions in geosynthetic reinforcement of geosynthetic-reinforced soil retaining wall under the change of loading rate. It is found from the analyses that the presented FEM can well simulate the rate-dependent behavior of geosynthetic-reinforced soil retaining wall and the tensile force of geosynthetic reinforcement arranged in retaining wall.