The invention relates to a low-grade iron ore direct reduction method, which comprises: calculating and taking a certain amount of coal powder, an additive, a binder and water by adopting the dry basis mass of iron ore to be treated as reference; uniformly mixing the taken components, and completely wetting to obtain an internal matching coal; uniformly mixing the internal matching coal and iron ore particles to be treated, and granulating to obtain granulated pellets; directly conveying the obtained granulated pellets into a rotary kiln, carrying out drying, pre-heating, and reduction roasting to carry out coal base direct reduction so as to obtain a reduced material, cooling the reduced material in the absence of air, and carrying out dry magnetic separation to obtain the reduced roasting pellets and the residual carbon; and carrying out treatments such as ore grinding and magnetic separation on the reduced roasting pellets to obtain iron concentrate, or carrying out re-grinding and re-magnetic separation to obtain the reduced iron powder, wherein the obtained residual carbon can be recycled. With the method of the present invention, the low-grade iron ore can be effectively treated, the internal matching coal and the additive are used to granulate, the wet pellets enter the kiln, the coal base direct reduction is performed, the magnetic separation is performed to obtain the high-grade iron concentrate or the directly-reduced iron powder, and the method has characteristics of energy saving, high efficiency, and rapidness.