Abstract: Genetic characteristics of the early-heading date in Gao 146A, a highly male-sterile line, were analyzed using the major gene plus polygene mixed inheritance model with the P1, P2, F1 and F2 generations derived from the hybrid Gao 146A × K103, and the genetic relationship between infertility and early-heading date was studied using χ2 test methods in this paper. The results showed that the early-heading trait in Gao 146A was a quantitative trait, and was controlled by two pairs of additive - dominance - epistatic major genes plus additive - dominance polygenic model, and the major gene effects is large, but the multi-gene effect is relatively small, in which a pair of main additive genes played the major role in either additive or dominant effect, and another major gene had a second role in dominant and epistatic effect. There were four kinds of phenotypes of the sterility and heading date in the F2 population, namely early-heading-fertile type, early-heading-infertility type, late-heading-fertile type and late-heading-infertility type, and the segregation ratio was 39:13:9:3, in line with the independently distribution law of three pairs of genes (χ2 = 3.18 < χ20.05 = 7.81). These results suggest that there pairs of genes controlling the male-sterile and early-heading traits respectively are of independent inheritance and non-linkage relationship.