In this paper, the dynamic surface control (DSC) algorithm is proposed for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems with nonminimum phase and the standard output-feedback form. The proposed algorithm is a stochastic vision by combining the traditional back-stepping together with the DSC technique, which can overcome the problem of 'explosion of complexity' in the back-stepping designing procedure for the stochastic nonlinear systems. Thus, it can reduce the computation complexity and is easy to be used in the actual implementation. It is shown that all the signals of the resulting closed-loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.