Abstract: Plant production constitutes the predominant food for human. High contents of heavy metals in plant production will result in potential risk to human health. Maize is a main grain production for human food and animal feed. This study took the maize collected from markets of Ruichang County, Jiangxi Province as the subject to measure its contents of Cd,Cu,Pb,Cr,Zn,Ni,Al,Mn and Co, assess their health risk for local inhabitants. The pollution situations of heavy metals were evaluated based on national food safety standards of China, and their potential health risk to adults and children by food ingestion were assessed by the methods of target hazard quotient(THQ)and hazard index(HI).The results showed that the contents of studied elements were all far below the current national food safety limits. Both THQ and HI values were less than 1. This indicated that health risk for humans was low through the maize consumption. The health risk for both adults and children caused by individual heavy metals was followed in the order of Zn>Mn>Co>Cu>Ni>Pb>Cd>Al>Cr. In addition, children were more sensitively affected by heavy metals from food ingestion. Overall, the quality of market maize in the studied area was good and there were no obvious health effects on humans. However, significant attentions should be paid to the consumption of maize for children.