Aiming at properly formulating maintenance strategy of protective equipment, this paper proposes a maintenance decision-making method based on risk and maintenance benefit, which can be used for realizing differential maintenance of protective equipment in terms of maintenance sequence and levels. Firstly, risk assessment model integrating both primary and secondary systems is employed to obtain risk values as the basis for deciding the maintenance sequence. Actual failure rate based on condition-based evaluation of protective devices is taken as the probability of risk occurrence, and the impact of protective equipment failure on the operation of primary systems is taken as the failure consequence. Then, maintenance cost and its impact on the failure rate of protective devices under different maintenance levels are analyzed. The maintenance risk benefit model is used to determine maintenance levels of protective equipment, which not only ensures the reliability of protection systems, but also considers the maintenance economics. Finally, simulation study is carried out based on IEEE9 bus system. The results verify the rationality of the proposed decision-making method.