The article investigates the problem of parity space‐based optimal fault detection for event‐triggered systems. By introducing a novel parity vector based event‐triggering mechanism, and taking the effects of faults, disturbances and event‐triggered transmission errors on the residual into consideration, it is proven that the optimal parity vector for time‐triggered residual generator, which can make a trade‐off between fault sensitivity and disturbance robustness, is also optimal for event‐triggered counterpart, as both fault and disturbance information are included in the event‐triggered transmission error. Then, a time‐varying threshold is designed for residual evaluation by accounting for the effects of disturbance and event‐triggered transmission errors on the residual. Based on this, a quantitative analysis of the influence of the event‐triggering mechanism on false alarm rate is developed, which provides a way to choose the event‐triggered parameter from the viewpoint of fault diagnosis. Moreover, the proposed method is extended to event‐triggered systems with packet dropouts. Finally, a benchmark model of the vehicle lateral dynamic system is utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed parity space‐based optimal event‐triggered fault detection approach.