The invention discloses a no-grid co-prime array DOA (direction of arrival) estimation method based on virtual array interpolation, and mainly solves a problem of information loss caused by the heterogeneity of a virtual array in the prior art. The method comprises the implementation steps: constructing a co-prime array at a receiving end; receiving an incident signal through the co-prime array, and carrying out the modeling; calculating an equivalent virtual signal corresponding to the receiving signal of the co-prime array; constructing an interpolation virtual array, and carrying out the modeling; constructing a multi-sampling snapshot signal of the interpolation virtual array and a sampling covariance matrix; constructing a projection matrix, and defining projection calculation correlated with the projection matrix; designing an optimization problem based on the minimization of the nuclear norm of the signal covariance matrix of the interpolation virtual array, and solving the optimization problem; and carrying out the estimation of the DOA according to the reconstructed covariance matrix of the interpolation virtual array. The method improves the DOA estimation freedom degree and resolution, and can be used for the passive positioning and target detection.