The invention belongs to the field of power grid protection technology, and particularly relates to a method and a device for identifying a fault type. The method comprises the steps of acquiring a recording file; comparing recorded current before fault occurrence in the recording file with the recorded current after fault occurrence, and generating a verification value; calculating a current representative value after fault occurrence in the recording file, wherein the current representative value is used for reflecting a current increasing condition of the recorded current after fault occurrence; and identifying the type of the fault according to the verification value and the current representative value, thereby realizing automatic identification for the fault type of a power distribution grid. The method and the device according to the invention have advantages of improving speed and accuracy in fault identification, and improving operation reliability of the power distribution grid.