Geotechnical practice includes construction works or structures in the course of which the soil is subjected to vertical repetitive stress in the process of compacting or exploitation, for example in the case of road or railway embankments, landfills etc. When the stress exceeds the pre-consolidation threshold there emerges accumulation of permanent deformation, usually horizontal, which causes additional lateral stress. A rule verified by long-term practical use was presented for to determine the horizontal stress resulting from mechanical pre-consolidation. Independent mathematical analysis has confirmed that the boundary ranges of the cyclic lateral stress factor correspond to the active or reactive states of strain. In geotechnical practice it is the reactive states, in which additional accumulation of lateral strain occurs in soil, that are important. A question remains to be answered: do the critical depths also depend on the degree of compacting, which in practice means that they depend on the pre-consolidation pressures applied when compacting the soils? The notion of critical depth should be linked to the linear relationship between the friction on the sidewall and resistance under the pile foot, respectively at the depths of up to 5 and 10 meters from the surface of the load-bearing soil.