In order to avoid waste of heat energy, improve energy efficiency and reduce heating costs, this paper proposes a shortterm heat load forecasting method based on a deep belief network (DBN). It utilizes the historical heat supply heat data, historical meteorological data, and weather forecast data to predict the user-side heating load in the next 24 hours. First, the correlation coefficient method is used to determine the meteorological data which has a greater impact on the shortterm heat load forecast. Second, the 3σ method is used to find and replace the outliers data, and the standardization is processed to form the experimental dataset. Then, using the divided data set, the heat load forecasting model is trained offline and verified, and the parameters are optimized. Finally, the historical heat load data and meteorological data within 72 hours and the weather forecast data within the next 24 hours are used as input to predict the heating load within the next 24 hours online. The experimental results show that the forecasting accuracy of the proposed method is better than the method based on support vector machine and the method based on long and short-term memory network.