The key to measuring residual stress by surface acoustic wave method is the accurate measurement of velocity. In this paper, the velocity of laser-induced broadband surface acoustic wave is studied, and three velocity calculation methods of surface acoustic wave, time domain method, phase method and wavelet method are compared. The calculation error of the time domain method under the condition of dispersion is analyzed. A recursive method for calculating phase difference is proposed to improve the efficiency of phase method. The simulated surface acoustic waves are used to compare the phase method and wavelet method under the conditions of attenuation and dispersion. Compared with the wavelet method, the phase method cannot distinguish the time when the frequency band appears, and the velocity calculation of adjacent frequency points is related, while the wavelet method is independent of each other. The wavelet method can improve the calculation accuracy of the velocity curve by interpolating the original data. After interpolation, the trend of curve is more obvious, and the fitting error is greatly reduced.