Most existing studies on the vibration analysis of cylindrical shells with structural stress are limited to uniform stress distribution. However, non-uniform stress distributions are encountered in many engineering applications. In this study, a unified solution for the vibration analysis of cylindrical shells with a general stress distribution is presented using the Flügge shell theory and modal orthogonality simplification. The obtained analytical solution can be applied to a structure with arbitrary distributed stress, thus it has a wider range of applications than previous methods. The accuracy and advantage of the proposed method are validated by comparing with the finite element method results.