When using the conventional finite element method, a great number of grid nodes are necessary to describe the large and uneven temperature gradients in the concrete around cooling pipes when calculating the temperature field of mass concrete with cooling pipes. In this paper, the temperature gradient properties of the concrete around a pipe were studied. A new calculation method was developed based on these properties and an explicit iterative algorithm. With a small number of grid nodes, both the temperature distribution along the cooling pipe and the temperature field of the concrete around the water pipe can be correctly calculated with this new method. In conventional computing models, the cooling pipes are regarded as the third boundary condition when solving a model of concrete with plastic pipes, which is an approximate way. At the same time, the corresponding parameters have to be got by expensive experiments and inversion. But in the proposed method, the boundary condition is described strictly, and thus is more reliable and economical. And numerical examples were used to illustrate that this method is accurate, efficient and applicable to the actual engineering.