Benefiting from the surface plasmon resonance effect, the gold nanorod saturable absorber possesses the properties of tunable broadband of saturable absorption and fast nonlinear response. It can also easy integrate with a variety of laser resonators, making it a promising saturable absorber with a wide broadband. The passively Q-switched 1 μm solid-state laser using gold nanorods as saturable absorbers is demonstrated. The gold nanorods are directly spin coated on the output coupler, and introduced in the laser resonator as saturable absorbers. Passively Q-switched operation of a LD pump Nd∶YVO4 laser at 1064 nm is realized accordingly. The pulsed laser output with a maximum average output power of 540 mW, a minimum pulse width of 138 ns, and a pulse repetition rate of 602 kHz are achieved when the pump power is 7.5 W.