The invention provides a single-stage coil cable tension sensor based on a self-inductance principle and a test method thereof, and belongs to the technical field of structural health monitoring. The single-stage coil cable tension sensor comprises a magnetic conductive steel cable test piece, a single-stage coil cable tension sensor for cable tension measurement, a coil skeleton for winding the sensor, a loading device, a test piece fixing and clamping device, a generation circuit for generating a self-inductance coil sensor excitation signal, an amplification circuit, a filtering circuit, an effective value circuit and a digital analog conversion circuit and other circuits for analyzing and processing each signal. The steel cable test piece magnetic permeability variance is used as the intermediate quantity, and a linear relation between the cable tension value and the self-inductance variance is established so that the cable tension value can be measured. The single-stage coil cable tension sensor based on a self-inductance principle and the test method thereof can solve the problems that a traditional magnetic flux cable tension sensor has more coils and is large in volume, and is low in anti-interference capability, and have the advantages of being simple in manufacturing process, being small in volume, and being able to improve the signal to noise ratio of the sensor.