The invention provides a GPS (global position system) terminal-based map matching method for vehicle position tracking, which belongs to the field of map matching. According to the method, the problem of inaccurate vehicle positioning caused by GPS signal deviation can be solved, a vehicle is matched with the right position on the current running road, the distance between the vehicle and the current road destination node is calculated, when a GPS signal is invalid, the position of the vehicle can be reckoned, and the time that the vehicle reaches the node within the critical zone of the road destination node is calculated. Considering that the GPS terminal for operating a map matching program has limited resources, the method synthetically utilizes a weight-based map matching thought and a curve fitting-based map matching thought which have good real time and combines road-network topology information, and different projection algorithms can be selected according to the current position of the vehicle. By using the method, vehicle position information with accurate real time is provided, and according to the method, vehicle monitoring, real-time traffic information collection, vehicle navigation, etc can be realized.