Abstract: With the rapid development of the mining and metallurgy industry, the amount of tailings accumulation is increasing year by year. In particular, iron tailings have become the focus of domestic researchers. Firstly, light high-strength ceramsite was prepared from iron tailings. Then the ceramsites were used as light aggregate to prepare ceramsite concrete. The effect of water-cement ratio, water reducing agent, sand and thickener on compressive strength and floating of ceramsite were studied with orthogonal test. Through experiments, the best scheme of the iron tailings-based ceramsite concrete was that the water-cement ratio was 0.25, the dosage of water reducer was 0.5%, the dosage of sand was 20% and the dosage of thickener was 0.12%. Finally, the 28-day high-performance ceramsite concrete with compressive strength of 67.33 MPa, flexural strength of 8.1 MPa and density of 1 940 kg/m³ was prepared. The floating problem of ceramsite in lightweight aggregate ceramsite concrete was solved.