Provided is an excitation surge current identification method based on a support vector classifier. The method selects seven characteristics of a secondary second harmonic, a third harmonic, a current dead angle, a wave width, a waveform distortion amount, a waveform correlation coefficient and an excitation side measured impedance as inputs of a support vector machine, then various running states of a transformer are trained, and a decision function identifying an excitation surge current and a fault current is constructed. When the transformer is out of order, data collected by a protection device collection system is calculated to obtain seven characteristics, the seven characteristics are put into the decision function and determination of an excitation surge current and a fault current is carried out. The identification method integrates advantages of principles of harmonic wave braking, a dead angle, waveform similarity and the like and avoids respective limitation, and the surge current identification credibility is raised. An algorithm can be converted into a convex optimization problem finally, and the local minimum problem which cannot be solved by a neural network is avoided. The method is free from a transformer wiring mode and is free from model parameters, the applicability is strong and the flexibility is good.