The invention discloses a remote reference magnetotelluric impedance calculation method based on correlation detection, and belongs to the field of geophysical exploration, for overcoming the disadvantage of low accuracy of conventional magnetotelluric tensor impedance calculation. The method comprises the following steps: electric fields and magnetic fields of a base station and a reference station are respectively acquired, processed and obtained, electromagnetic field coherence degrees of the base station and the reference station are respectively calculated, when the two electromagnetic field coherence degrees are greater than a certain threshold, data segments are reserved and marked, and data segments, free from non-relevant noise interference, of the base station and the reference station are obtained; and then, magnetic field component coherence degrees of the base station and the reference station with the marked data segments are calculated, when the magnetic field component coherence degrees are greater than a certain threshold, data segments, free from noise interference, of these magnetic fields are reserved, otherwise, the data segments are abandoned, participation in subsequent tensor impedance estimation is canceled, tensor impedance estimation is carried out by use of a conventional remote reference magnetotelluric mode based on a Robust method, and apparent resistivity and impedance phase values are calculated by use of tensor estimated values. The method provided by the invention is applied to magnetotelluric exploration.