Aiming at the problems of cooperative control for multiple surface vessels, such as unknown environmental disturbances and actuator faults, a fixed-time distributed sliding mode cooperative control method for multiple surface vessels with actuator faults is proposed. The scheme ensures the global fixed time stability of the cooperative control system. Firstly, a fixed-time disturbance observer is designed to provide the estimations of lumped disturbances including unknown environmental disturbances and actuator faults. Secondly, fixed-time non-singular fast terminal sliding mode manifold is introduced to effectively eliminate singularity and improve chattering of system. Thirdly, a distributed fault tolerant controller based on the fixed-time non-singular fast terminal sliding mode manifold and the fixed-time disturbance observer is proposed to make the upper bounds of convergence time is independent of the initial state. Finally, simulations are given to demonstrate the proposed control law.