An analytical modeling method of hard-coating laminated plate under base excitation was studied considering strain-dependent characteristic of coating material (i.e. a kind of material nonlinear behavior). For convenience, the strain-dependent characteristic of hard-coating material was characterized by polynomial, and the material parameters were divided into two parts: linearity and nonlinearity. Hard coating was regarded as a special layer in the analysis and Lagrange’s equation was used to acquire nonlinear equation of motion of the hard-coating laminated plate. Based on Newton–Raphson method, the procedure of solving resonant response and resonant frequency of composite plate was presented. Finally, a T300/QY89l1 laminated plate with NiCoCrAlY + YSZ hard coating was chosen to demonstrate the proposed method, the linear and nonlinear vibrations of the composite plate were solved, and only the linear results were validated by ANSYS software. The results reveal that there is a big difference between the calculation results considering the nonlinearity of coating material and the linear results, which means the laminated plate displays soft nonlinear phenomenon because of depositing coating.