The services of ecosystems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are critical to the functioning of the Earth’s life-support system. They contribute to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent part of the total economic value of the planet. Due to the public goods properties of most environmental goods or ecosystem services, non-market valuation techniques should be applied to get their economic value. The contingent valuation method is one of the most significant approach of non-market valuation techniques and has been used widely. At present, CVM is not only in principle applicable for all kinds of ecosystem service valuation, but also has been deemed to an exclusive method to estimate the benefits of non-use valuation of public goods. This paper is a literature summary and study on progresses of CVM applications in ecosystem services evaluation. The article covers the theoretical underpinning and the economics principle of CVM, the development characteristic of its application in the ecosystem service valuation, the differences and the same aspects that exit in the applications, and inspiration of improvement aimed at the practical situation of our country lastly. This paper summarizes the basal definition and economical principle of the contingent valuation method firstly. And on the basis of abundance cases abroad, the breakthrough of it’s application on different types of ecosystem service valuation can be summarized that: (1) with the processing of time, the range of valuations is becoming much wider, meanwhile, the emphases have been changed; (2) the methods to handle many kinds of bias is growing diversified, including hypothesis bias, information bias, part-whole bias, length of stay bias and so on; to make further explanation, some corresponding cases are given; (3) there are several methods having been used in a case-study, for the sake of making the more legible decision for local government; (4) the further study that the change of residents’ current WTP on the basis of species population hypothesis change has been a new research hotpot; (5) significant differences between the valuations on the same type of ecosystem service among countries; (6) dichotomous choice techniques is the more familiar vehicle than others; (7) each approach is applied in research cases, including the face-to-face, sending e-mail and phone-calling approach; (8) the popularization degree of its application is relative to the level of economic development of the study site. In addition, there are differences between the applications domestic and abroad: (1) the domain of research in China is still narrower; (2) the emphases are different from the researches overseas; (3) the results are lower; (4) open-ended and payment card are often adopted; (5) the face-to-face survey approach is mostly used in the cases. The theory and practice research of CVM in China is not prevalent, which is related to the practical situation of our country. It is necessary to extend the application of the method in domestic analogous researches. In the end, the direction of CVM applications in China is pointed out for further studies.