Agriculture has an important role in maintaining food availability. One of the most popular plant nutrition additives in agriculture is inorganic fertilizer, however, it can degrade soil health. This problem can be solved by naturally composting formed soil organic matter (SOM), of which humic substances are one of the main components. However, this process takes a very long time. Humic substances can be obtained faster through the rice husk pyrolysis process. This paper aims to study the characteristics of the humic substance from rice husk pyrolysis and understand its correlation with humic substances from SOM. Rice husk pyrolysis was performed in a fixed bed reactor at a temperature of 400, 500, and 600 ℃, weight of 10 g, and retention time of 45 min. The results show that the minimum pyrolysis temperature to obtain sufficient liquid product is 365 ℃. The liquid product from the pyrolysis process consists of two phases, water phase and tar phase. Based on its chemical properties, namely colour, solubility, organic species (functional group), acidity, hydrophilicity, carbon number, molecular weight, and carbon content, a liquid product from pyrolysis has similarities with humic substances derived from SOM, where the water phase (liquid smoke) has similarities to fulvic acid, while tar has similarities to humin. The results also suggest that pyrolysis can be a faster alternative method for producing humic substances.