Thermal ablation process of gold film irradiated by a single femtosecond pulse laser is investigated using the two-temperature model. The phase change interface is obtained by considering the interface energy balance equation and gas kinetics law. Comparisons between numerical results with the dual-hyperbolic two-step (DHTS) model and the parabolic two-step (PTS) model are presented, the effects of laser parameters and film thickness on thermal ablation process are also investigated. Results show that compared with PTS model, the DHTS model is more close to the experimental results, the melting and ablation depth of the DHTS model are much higher than the results of the PTS model in the same conditions, and with increasing laser fluence or decreasing pulse width, the ablation depth is gradually increased, the film thickness has a slightly effect on the thermal ablation process.