The direct reduction test of carbon-containing pellet of V-Ti-bearing magnetite was carried out by simulating rotary hearth furnace process under the laboratory condition. The main influencing factors for metallization rate of carbon-containing pellet of V-Ti-bearing magnetite were studied and optimized using the response surface methodology based on central composite design. The study shows that, the influence of roasting temperature on metallization rate of pellet is the most significant, the influence of roasting time is the second, and the influence of carbon proportion (w_c/w₀) is the minimum. Through analysis of the experiment results, a quadratic polynomial model of the metallization rate of pellet was built. The optimal process parameters of model prediction are as follows: the roasting temperature is 1 350 ℃, the roasting time is 35.14 min and the carbon proportion is 1.25. In addition, the verification test was conducted under the optimum process condition, it was found out that the actual metallization rate is in good agreement with the predicted metallization rate, and the relative error is only 0.87%