In this paper, the consensus control problem of leader‐following linear multi‐agent systems with the input delay is investigated. We first present a necessary and sufficient condition for the leader‐following consensus of linear multi‐agent systems with the input delay. Then by means of the state transition matrix of linear delay systems, the leader‐following consensus problem is transformed into a distributed nonconvex optimization problem. Furthermore, a numerical method based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is proposed to solve the distributed nonconvex optimization problem. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.