Reliability evaluation is a fundamental problem to be solved in power system planning and operation, which is of great significance to ensure power supply and provide support for security warning of the power grid. A reliability evaluation method for transmission grid based on risk theory is proposed in this paper, which effectively combines the fault occurrence probability and the result of load loss due to the contingencies, quantitatively describes the reliability evaluation index under different contingencies. This method can provide a comprehensive total reliability evaluation index of the system under different line fault probabilities, which cam reflect the relative reliability of the transmission grid network. Finally, simulation tests are conducted in the IEEE-24 bus system and the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified.