CO adsorption and activation on Ni(100), (110) and (111) surfaces have been systematically investigated to probe the effect of coverage and surface structure on CO adsorption and activation. Herein, dispersion-corrected density functional theory calculations (DFT-D) were employed, and the related thermodynamic energies at 523 K were calculated by including the zero-point energy, thermal energy and entropic corrections; the results show that the saturated coverage of CO on the Ni(111), (100) and (110) surfaces correspond to 8/9, 9/12 and 9/9 ML, respectively. As the coverage increases, the stepwise adsorption free energies decrease on the flat (111) and (100) surfaces, whereas small changes occur on the corrugated (110) surface. CO migrates from the three-fold hollow site to the top site on the (111) surface, and from the four-fold hollow to the two-fold bridge site on the (100) surface, while all the CO molecules remain at the short-bridge site on the (110) surface. As a result, the obtained intermolecular CO-CO repulsive interactions on the flat surface are stronger than the interactions on the corrugated surface. Furthermore, the computed CO vibrational frequencies at different levels of coverage over the Ni surfaces agree well with the experimental results. On the other hand, kinetic analyses were utilized to compare the stepwise CO desorption with the dissociation at different degrees of coverage on the three Ni surfaces. CO desorption is more favorable than its dissociation at all coverage levels on the most exposed Ni(111) surface. Analogously, CO desorption becomes more favorable than its dissociation on the Ni(110) surface at higher coverage, except for coverage of 1/9 ML, in which CO desorption competes with its dissociation. However, on the Ni(100) surface, CO dissociation is more favorable than its desorption at 1/12 ML; when the coverage increases from 2/12 to 3/12 ML, equilibrium states exist between dissociation and desorption over the surface; when the coverage is greater than or equal to 4/9 ML, CO desorption becomes more favorable than dissociation. By applying the atomistic thermodynamics method, the determination of stable coverage as a function of temperature and partial pressure provides useful information, not only for surface science studies under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, but also for practical applications at high temperature and pressure in exploring reactions.