Operation and maintenance personnel formulate a maintenance plan when maintaining a protection device. To accurately evaluate and repair a protection device, a state evaluation method of relay protection device based on the sparrow search algorithm optimized SVM is proposed. Using the established relay protection device index system, the health state of the device is classified to realize its state evaluation. First, this paper establishes the state evaluation index system of relay protection devices, and collects relevant data on the protection device according to that system. Secondly, the SSA-SVM relay protection device state evaluation model is established. This is used to classify the health state of the protection device in terms of normal, attention, abnormality and severity. Finally, SSA-SVM, BA-SVM, GWO-SVM and WOA-SVM algorithms are used to evaluate the health status of relay protection devices, and the accuracy and real-time of each algorithm is compared. The simulation results show that the SSA-SVM algorithm has the highest accuracy in evaluating the health state of the protection device, and the state evaluation results can provide a basis for operation and maintenance personnel. This work is supported by the Science and Technology Project of State Grid Corporation of China (No. 5212002000AR).