The contact pressure in jointed plates was measured by means of an improved ultrasonic technique. In order to get calibration curve, the relationship between contact pressure and ratio of boundary and bottom echo of normal beam probes were obtained for the calibration blocks with various surface roughness. The ratio of boundary and bottom echoes were measured for the upper/under plates locally compressed with uniform pressure, and the distribution of contact pressure was obtaines. The measured pressure has a good agreement with results of FEM analysis. Thus the proposed ultrasonic method in this work is very useful to measure the contact pressure.