For effective identification of rub-impact faults between rotor and stator of equipment, the paper has contributed the method integrating dual complexity parameters and variational mode decomposition (VMD). Firstly, to effectively separate the fault characteristics involved in signals, VMD algorithm was applied to decompose vibration signals and the component signals were obtained; secondly, taking account of the large difference of fault feature information involved in different component signals and in order to make options of sensitive fault component signals and reduce the loss of fault features, multi-scale Lempel–Ziv complexity and complexity parameter in Hjorth parameters were brought. Starting from 2 different perspectives of complexity evaluation, choose from the sensitive component signals containing more fault characteristics with these 2 complexity parameters; thirdly, signals were reconstructed based on selected sensitive component signals, and meanwhile, singular value difference spectrum algorithm was used to denoise reconstructed signals to further lessen the influence of noises; finally, the rub-impact fault between rotor and stator was identified by square demodulation spectrum (SDS) of denoised signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been proved by comparative analysis with other approaches as well as validation analysis of rub-impact fault signals in multiple situations.