A boundary element method is presented for analyzing the thermoelastic contact problem. In this problem, temperature and stress fields are coupled since the thermal distortion changes the size of the contact zone and then affects the heat flow. The displacement, traction, temperature and temperature gradient are unknown in the contact zone. By the use of residual vectors of discretized field equations obtained by the boundary element method, the objective function is defined. The contact conditions are also introduced to the objective function. The thermal resistance of the contact surface is considered as a function of the contact pressure. The solution is obtained through minimizing the objective function by means of the conjugate gradient method. In order to demonstrate the practical applicability of the method, several numerical examples are presented.