The invention discloses a performance parameter based civil aircraft engine starting system health monitoring method and relates to the technical field of equipment state monitoring. On the basis of aircraft QAR data, a performance parameter baseline model of important parameters in a civil aircraft engine starting system is established with a data mining technology; then, a covariance matrix of test samples is calculated; finally, the similarity and the mahalanobis distance between the test samples and the baseline model are obtained with a mahalanobis distance technology, the health state ofthe system is represented with the distance, and the purpose of health monitoring is achieved. The method is applied to the civil aircraft engine starting system, the problem of insufficiency of performance evaluation means of the aircraft engine starting system is solved, the performance state of the engine starting system can be accurately evaluated, early warning is timely given at the early stage of failure of the engine starting system, and unplanned accidents are reduced; and besides, performance evaluation data come from existing civil aircraft QAR data and have higher practicability and operability.