Abstract. In this paper, we investigated the local stability of a simply supported functionally graded material (FGM) rectangular plate subjected to the transversal and in-plate excitations in the uniform thermal environment both analytical and numerical approaches. Three kinds of critical points of the bifurcation response equations are considered, which are characterized by a double zero eigenvalues, a simple zero and a pair of pure imaginary eigenvalues as well as two pairs of pure imaginary eigenvalues in nonresonant case, respectively. With the aid of a symbolic computation language Maple and normal form theory, the explicit expressions of critical bifurcation lines are obtained. Finally, the numerical solutions obtained by using fourth-order Runge-Kutta method agree with the analytic predictions.