It is crucial to conduct highly accurate estimation of the state of charge (SOC) of lithium-ion batteries during the real-time monitoring and safety control. Based on residual constraint fading factor unscented Kalman filter, the paper proposes an SOC estimation method to improve the accuracy of online estimating SOC. A priori values of terminal voltage were fitted using cubic Hermite interpolation. In combination with the Thevenin equivalent circuit model, the method of adaptive forgetting factor recursive least squares is used to identify the model parameters. To address the problem that the UKF method is strongly influenced by system noise and observation noise, the paper proposes an improved method of residual constrained fading factor. Finally, the effectiveness of this method was verified by the test of Hybrid Pulse Power Characteristic and Beijing Bus Dynamic Stress Test. Results show that under HPPC conditions, compared with other methods, the algorithm in the paper estimates that the SOC error of the battery remains between -0.38% and 0.948%, reducing the absolute maximum error by 51.5% at least and the average error by 62.7% at least. Moreover, under the condition of Beijing Bus Dynamic Stress Test the algorithm estimates the SOC error of the battery stays between -0.811% and 0.526%, and the SOC estimation errors are all within 0.2% after ten seconds of operation. Compared with other methods, the absolute maximum error can be reduced by 42.7% at least and the average error is reduced by 95% at least. And the test proves that the method is of higher accuracy, better convergence and stronger robustness.INDEX TERMS lithium-ion battery, state of charge estimation, Residual constraint fading factorunscented Kalman filter, adaptive forgetting factor recursive least square, cubic Hermite interpolation.