The invention provides a UUV (Unmanned Underwater Vehicle) path tracking method based on self-adaption sliding-mode control. The method comprises the steps of 1, initializing; 2, obtaining a current state of a UUV; 3, establishing an underactuated UUV horizontal error equation to obtain the positional deviation xe, ye and a course deviation value psi e; 4, utilizing a sliding-mode control method to respectively design a speed sliding-mode control law, a position sliding-mode control law and a stem phase angle sliding-mode control law and enabling th ud to be zero, the xe to be zero and the psi e to be zero by controlling thrust Xprop, expected speed (shown in the following image) and torque Nprop; 5, updating a self-adaption law of handover gain and a self-adaption law of boundary layer thickness; 6, performing control input saturation compensation; 7, enabling k = k +1, returning to the step 2 and updating the control laws and the self-adaption laws for the next time to achieve the accurate control on the UUV horizontal path tracking. The UUV path tracking method can only depend on a controller which is designed according to a horizontal dynamical model to stabilize the system and is suitable for various underactuated UUVs.