Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a method and a device for controlling a refresh rate of a mobile terminal and a mobile terminal. The method includes: determining that each of at least one foreground applications running currently is in a whitelist consisting of preset applications; obtaining a preset refresh rate corresponding to each of the at least one foreground application in the whitelist, and determining a target refresh rate of a display screen of the mobile terminal according to the preset refresh rate corresponding to each of the at least one foreground applications, in which an operation mode of the display screen is a command mode; and controlling the display screen by a display controller to read display frame data to be displayed from a frame buffer unit of the display screen at a frequency same as the target refresh rate and to display the display frame data.