In this paper, a new method is proposed, calculating the single mesh stiffness by cobining the silce principle and contact line analysis. Firstly, this method obtains the length of the contact line of the helical gear through contact line analysis. Secondly, along the tooth face width, the teeth of helical gear is separated into a series of equivalent thin teeth of spur gear. Thirdly, in order to consider the slice coupling effect, a weighting factor is introduced to modify the stiffness of the thin tooth itself according to the contribution of the thin tooth to the overall stiffness, which is distributed in parabola. Finally, by integrating the equivalent thin teeth of the spur gear along the contact line, the single mesh stiffness is calculated. The investigation shows that the influence of the slice coupling effect on single meshing stiffness related to the relationship between the value of transverse contact ratio and overlap ratio. When transverse contact ratio is greater, the influence of the slice coupling effect on the single mesh stiffness is very small an can be ignored, and when the overlap ratio is larger, which is significant.