Lightning fault is one of the main reasons of transmission line faults, which is necessary to be predicted to reduce the loss caused by lightning faults.The accurate detection of lightning area has conflict with the accurate lightning prediction, which makes it hard to further improve the accuracy of lightning fault prediction based on current method.With the development of date mining technology, large amount of measured lightning information, historical lightning faults information, which are deposited in the database of power system for many years, can be utilized to predict lightning faults.Therefore, a lightning prediction method for transmission lines is proposed based on BP neutral network.Firstly, the input parameters of lightning faults are analyzed based on the historical lightning data.Then, a BP neutral network is employed to establish the prediction model, in which PSO is employed to calculate initial weight value and LM is employed to accelerate training speed of BP neutral network.Lastly, actual lightning information is adopted to verify the effectiveness of proposed method.Simulation results show that 80% of lightning faults can be predicted by proposed method which can provide a reference for power system operation.