Abstract: Horticultural crop has high economic benefits and has remarkable effects on supply guarantee and increase farmers' income. Breeding could provide basis for long-term sustainable development and variety renovation of horticultural crop. Protection of plant variety right of could guarantee benefits of and give impetus continuously for breeders. Therefore, it is of great importance to enhance development of horticultural crop by research on development status and existing problems of horticultural crop variety protection. In this paper, the range of species and genus of main protected horticultural crop, application situation of protection right of new varieties, application subject constitution, and declare region structure of protection right of new variety were analyzed and some development countermeasures were also proposed from four aspects including variety publicity, legal protection, policy support and entrepreneur guidance.