In wide-swath missile-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, the range-variant residual phase modulation, which is introduced by the presence of trajectory deviations, will seriously degrade the focusing quality of the final image. To deal with this problem, a motion compensation approach for missile-borne SAR is proposed. In the approach, the signal model of motion error for diving movement is established. Then, according to the inertial navigation system (INS) information, the range-variant residual Doppler rates of the echoes are extracted by using the Doppler rate estimation, on the basis of which the corresponding phase error can be calculated and compensated. Simulation results show that, by using the proposed approach, the influences of the motion error on focusing are greatly reduced with the well focused image obtained.