The invention provides a method for recycling industrial waste sulfate slag, which comprises the steps of sieving, stirring, magnetic separation, acid dipping, rinsing and drying to obtain iron-bearing materials. The method not only reallocates the available resource of the sulfate slag which is difficult to be processed and has high pollution, but also reduces the severe contamination of the sulfate slag to the environment and simultaneously lowers the production cost greatly; the metal recovery rate is 50 to 82 percent, high quality iron concentrate with the grade of iron being larger than 60 percent, the grade of sulfur being smaller than 0.3 percent and the grade of arsenic being smaller than 0.1 percent is obtained; simultaneously the recovery processing capacity is large, the equipment is simple, the investment is small, the operation is convenient, the sulfate slag material is not limited, both the sulfate slag with high iron content and the sulfate slag with low iron content can be recycled, and the method has good social benefit and remarkable economic effect.