The invention discloses a method for calculating the ultimate bearing capacity value of a double-layer cylindrical pressure-resistant shell, and relates to the technical field of deep sea engineering.The method comprises the following steps: firstly, establishing an initial geometric model of the double-layer cylindrical shell, then establishing a finite element model of the double-layer cylindrical shell, determining elastic-plastic parameters of a double-layer cylindrical shell material, defining section parameters and boundary conditions of the finite element model of the double-layer cylindrical shell, and then performing nonlinear solving calculation by adopting a Newton iteration method; and finally, extracting a calculation result of the double-layer cylindrical shell. According tothe invention, inner and outer layer cylindrical shell grid nodes are in one-to-one correspondence, a one-dimensional gap unit is used, a complex contact nonlinear problem is converted into a simplesmall slip model, and the calculation efficiency is improved; meanwhile, geometric nonlinearity, material nonlinearity and boundary nonlinearity are considered, the arc length method is adopted for carrying out nonlinear buckling calculation on the ultimate bearing capacity of the double-layer cylindrical pressure-resistant shell, and the calculation precision is improved.