Ensuring construction safety and promoting environmental conservation, necessitate the determination of the optimal jacking force for rectangular pipe jacking projects. However, reliance on empirical calculations for estimating jacking force often resulted in overly conservative results. This study proposed a modified Protodyakonov ' s arch model to calculate the soil pressure around the jacked pipe considering the critical damage boundary. A three-dimensional log-spiral prism model, based on limit equilibrium method was applied to analyze the resistance on the shield face. The determination of jacking force integrated factors such as soil pressure around jacked pipes, friction coefficient between pipe and soil, and shield face resistance. By utilizing Suzhou ' s jacking-pipe engineering as a practical context, the accuracy was validated against field monitoring data and existing jacking force calculation models of varying specifications. Parametric analysis indicated the jacking force is linearly correlated with the soil unit weight and pipe-soil friction coefficient. However, the jacking force decreases significantly with increasing internal friction angle. As the internal friction angle rose from 25 degrees to 50 degrees , the soil arch height gradually diminished from 8.91 to 2.59 m. Notably, a complete arch structure failed to form above the jacked pipe when the cover depth ratio was less than 0.5. The heightened predictive precision of the proposed model enhanced its suitability for practical shallow buried tunnel jacking force predictions.