The invention discloses a coherent signal DOA estimation method based on a co-prime array, and the method comprises the steps: firstly solving a covariance matrix of the co-prime array, carrying out the feature decomposition of the covariance matrix, and finding a feature vector corresponding to a maximum feature value; secondly, decomposing the feature vector into two parts according to the number of array elements of a co-prime array subarray, and rearranging elements of the two parts respectively to obtain two Hankel matrixes H1 and H2; thirdly, performing singular value decomposition on the H1 and the H2 to obtain noise subspaces of the H1 and the H2; and finally, on the basis of the noise subspaces of the H1 and the H2, spatial spectrums of the H1 and the H2 are drawn by applying a MUSIC method, the same spectral peak in the spatial spectrums of the H1 and the H2 is found, DOA values corresponding to the spectral peak in the spatial spectrums of the H1 and the H2 are recorded and averaged, and a final DOA estimation value is obtained. According to the method, vectorization operation does not need to be carried out on the received signals of the sparse array, the co-prime characteristic of the array can be fully utilized, the angle estimation value of the coherent signals is obtained, and the blank of coherent signal arrival angle estimation carried out by the co-prime array is filled.