Aiming at the problem of electromagnetic coupling between the cable core and metal sheath, which has impact on the accuracy of fault location, a method for fault location of high-voltage cables considering the metal sheath coupling is proposed. This method establishes the coupling relationship between the cable core and metal sheath through a double τ distribution parameter model, and uses the double-end electrical quantity of the cable to determine the expression of the cable core distributed voltage. Then the locating criterion is constructed by using the difference between the instantaneous value of the core voltage at the fault point. At the same time, the bad data is effectively eliminated, and the chaotic particle swarm search method is used to solve the exact fault location. The calculation results of the data obtained by establishing the PSCAD/EMTDC simulation model show that the proposed fault location algorithm has high accuracy under different fault distance and fault resistance. This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China in 2017 (No. 2017YF C0804400) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52077215).