The traditional battery state of charge (SOC) estimation method, which is based on neural networks, directly uses terminal voltage and terminal current as the input data. Although it is convenient to implement, it produces a large estimation error when the current and voltage change drastically. To solve this problem, a new method, which uses a composite multiscale wavelet transform, is proposed to estimate the battery SOC. In the proposed method, a wavelet transform is applied to the input data, and this process obtains the approximate coefficients and detail coefficients of the input data at different scales. A neural network then uses these coefficients as inputs to estimate the SOC. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of the battery SOC estimation without changing the neural network structure or algorithm.