Abstract The plasma-beta effect on the n = 1 resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) field penetration in purely radio-frequency (RF) wave heated discharges has been investigated in EAST. The experimental results show that the dependence of the threshold RMP coil current for field penetration, I RMP,th , on the total absorbed power P _tot scales as approximately I RMP,th ∝ P tot 0.30 , indicating that the error-field tolerance is improved with increasing RF power. This is benefited by the increased electron perpendicular flow dominated by a counter-current electron diamagnetic flow with increasing RF power. However, theoretical scaling in cylindrical geometry overestimates the power index. Assuming an additional term β N α β N for the normalized beta in the scaling, it is shown that the fitted α β N from the experimental observation is around −1, indicating a degradation effect of plasma beta. To clarify the underlying physics of the plasma-beta effect that was not included in the theoretical scaling in cylindrical geometry, the MARS-Q code with full toroidal geometry is employed for simulation of nonlinear field penetration (Liu et al 2013 Phys. Plasmas 20 042503). The MARS-Q simulation results reproduce the β N dependence well, and hence the P _tot scaling of the threshold current in experimental observations. The main reason for this is that the net total torque, which is mainly contributed by the neoclassical toroidal viscosity (NTV), increases with increasing plasma β N . The results demonstrate that the nonlinear toroidal coupling effect via NTV torque plays an important role in determining field penetration, even in cases with relatively low β N ∈ [ 0.3 , 0.6 ] , which is far less than the no-wall beta limit.