Meteorological satellites are an important national infrastructure, which have been heavily invested and have a huge potential benefit nationalwide. The evaluation of socialeconomic benefits becomes more important since it answers the significant questions of why should more public resources located in meteorological satellite systems, and how valuable is their applications. A framework of benefit evaluation for meteorological satellites is established. This framework contains two parts: one is the contribution of meteorological satellite data to meteorological services, and the other is the benefit directly from the application of satellite data and products. To be specific, a contribution rate is adopted from the related researches and reports in the first part, while the other part covers all the benefits of direct satellite data applications which are quantitatively or qualitatively evaluated. The preliminary evaluation of the total benefits from meteorological satellite application is from 33.55×109 to 84.66×109 RMB in 2012 in China. Further comparison to those of the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) reveals that the benefits of China and US are relatively close, while both are much smaller than that of EU. However, the costbenefit ratio of China is higher than that of EU. The difference in the methods and scales of evaluation is the main cause. Thus, a consensus in the methods of evaluation should be reached among all the operational meteorological systems as soon as possible. It will better guide the development of the Chinese Fengyun meteorological satellite system and improve its efficiency.