In the current unified standard for reliability design, it lacks full considerations of the range of load effect ratio for reliability analysis of light weight steel structures. Firstly, a computational method based on stress was proposed to calculate load effect ratio, which solves the problem that which kind of load effects can be chosen to calculate load effect ratio when the member fails with actions of several kinds of internal forces. Then, the range of load effect ratio was studied for light weight steel structures after some analyses of several members with this method. It is found that the load effect ratio of light weight steel structures can adopt large values under the disadvantage distributions of snow load. The reliability was also calculated for light weight steel structures designed with current partial factors. Its result shows that the reliability of light weight steel structure is low. Finally, the reliability was analyzed for light weight steel structures with different load effect ratios when snow load exceeded the design standard level. It indicates that the reliability is low for light weight steel structures with large load effect ratio. This provides some complementary explanations for the phenomena that the light steel structures are more likely to fail under snow disaster.