The invention provides a method for calculating the transient current distribution of a dry-type smoothing reactor. The method comprises the following steps that: establishing a dry-type smoothing reactor equivalent circuit; defining the system energy function of the equivalent circuit; calculating the dissipation energy of all resistors in the equivalent circuit; calculating energy stored by allinductors in the equivalent circuit; calculating the adsorption energy of all current sources in the equivalent circuit; and calculating the current of each branch. By use of the method, in a calculation process, new energy, i.e., a node flux linkage is defined and is taken as a state variable to list a current equation, and calculation accuracy is greatly improved.