In the present study, 22 certified milk samples without melamine were collected, then 50 adulterated milk samples with added different content of melamine (0.1-1 500 mg·kg-1) were prepared. The near-infrared (NIR) spectra of these milk samples were measured. The possibility of using NIR spectra to detect melamine in milk was studied. Partial least square regression (PLSR) was applied to construct the calibration model between NIR spectra and the content of melamine. The results showed that NIR spectroscopy can not accurately predict the content of melamine because of its poor detection limit. However, the combination of NIR spectra and partial least square-discriminate analysis (PLS-DA) was applied to differentiate the certified milk samples and the adulterated milk sample. The classification accuracy was 100%. Therefore, NIR spectra could be used to preliminarily detect whether the milk was adulterated with melamine. As a complementary detecting method to the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), NIR spectra could improve the detecting efficiency of milk.