The present invention discloses a protection switching apparatus for nodes in a Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) network, including: a first switching module, for receiving inner ringlet data and transmitting data to the outer ringlet; a second switching module, for receiving outer ringlet data and transmitting data to the inner ringlet; and when it is in a normal mode, each of the switching modules transmits the received ringlet data to the other switching module connected to itself, and the received ringlet data are transmitted through normal data paths; when protection switching is required and frame boundaries of data are reached, the first and second switching modules directly switch data paths within themselves, and transmit the received ringlet data through WRAP data paths. At the same time, a protection switching method for nodes in an RPR network is provided. This invention is easy to realize, and data path switching is performed at frame boundaries of data transmission, thus no packet will be lost and reliability of RPR network nodes is guaranteed.