The invention discloses a method and a device for controlling an access control list of network equipment, wherein the method maps the access control list (ACL) of the network equipment to a management information base (MIB) of a simple network management protocol (SNMP) to obtain an ACL tree. The method comprises the steps of reading the ACL tree in the MIB through the SNMP; and managing the parameters of each node sequentially from a child node to a father node according to the type of each node in the ACL tree. Compared with the technical proposal that network managers input a large amountof configuration commands to control the ACL of the network equipment manually, the method and the device capable of controlling the ACL of the network equipment by the SNMP lower the configuration complexity of the ACL, and further improve the work efficiency of the network equipment.