Estimating the spatial distribution of coseismic slip is an ill-posed inverse problem, and solutions may be extremely oscillatory due to measurement errors without any constraints on the coseismic slip distribution. In order to obtain stable solution for coseismic slip inversion, regularization method with smoothness-constrained was imposed. Trade-off parameter in regularized inversion, which balances the minimization of the data misfit and model roughness, should be a critical procedure to achieve both resolution and stability. Then, the active constraint balancing approach is adopted, in which the trade-off parameter is regarded as a spatial variable at each model parameter and automatically determined via the model resolution matrix and the spread function. Numerical experiments for a synthetical model indicate that regularized inversion using active constraint balancing approach can provides stable inversion results and have low sensitivity to the knowledge of the exact character of the Gaussian noise. Regularized inversion combined with active constraint balancing approach is conducted on the 2005 Nias earthquake. The released moment based on the estimated coseismic slip distribution is 9.91×1021N·m, which is equivalent to a moment magnitude of 8.6 and almost identical to the value determined by USGS. The inversion results for synthetic coseismic uniform-slip model and the 2005 earthquake show that smoothness-constrained regularized inversion method combined with active constraint balancing approach is effective, and can be reasonable to reconstruct coseismic slip distribution on fault.