The invention provides a commuting traveling characteristic analysis method based on license plate data. The method includes: (1) acquiring detection data of road network intelligent toll-gate devices and urban static information; (2) performing data quality examination on vehicle license plate original data detected by the intelligent toll-gate devices, obtaining effective vehicle license plate data, integrating the effective data according to a time sequence, and analyzing the traveling types of the vehicles; (3) extracting license plate data information of urban commuting vehicles, and constructing traveling chain data of the commuting vehicles; and (4) performing statistics on traveling information of the commuting travelling vehicles, analyzing the resident leisure activity condition, the resident commuting traveling time and distance, and the resident traveling demand, and obtaining a resident traveling rule. According to the method, the commuting traveling characteristics of resident private vehicles are analyzed through data of a lot of license plates, statistics and analysis of the resident traveling demands are realized, support data is supported for a traffic planning model, the traffic demand management level is improved, and the problem of traffic jam is effectively alleviated.