Abstract: In the saddle at the top of a suspension bridge tower, steel wires and the saddle interact with each other to generate a pressure and a friction force, the efficient and accurate prediction of which is very important to the sliding resistance design of the main cable. This study proposed a new contact element method for the simulation and calculation of the interaction between the cable and the saddle. This method is based on the discrete rigid body theory, the nodal and element conceptions in the finite element method are introduced to construct the contact elements between steel wires and the contact elements between the steel wire and the saddle. The contact element can be expressed as a straight-line element with one compressive force degree of freedom. Thus, the cable-saddle system can be modeled using geometric lines connecting the centers of steel wires, supporting the definition of many different friction coefficients and generating an equation system to be solved directly. The ANSYS-MATLAB joint code is adopted to implement the algorithm. Experimental data validates the developed codes. Subsequently, the torsional unbalanced issue in the method and the stochastic analysis of the proposed contact element method are discussed. Finally, hand-calculation formulas for the side compressive force and its resultant of cable-saddle systems are derived. The present study provides an essential reference for the calculations of sliding resistance of cable-saddle systems in suspension bridges.