The effects of carbon fiber orientation and resin content on the laser energy transfer direction and cutting quality during laser cutting of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) are studied. According to the mixture rule of composites, the parameters are set, and the three dimensional finite element models for single-layer CFRP with carbon fiber orientations of 0°, 45°, and 90°, and resin contents of 30% to 50% are established. The numerical simulation results show that, during the multi-directional laser cutting of single-layer CFRP, the energy transfer direction is mainly dependent on the laser cutting direction, and the angle of transfer direction increases with the increase of fiber orientation angle. As for the steady cutting, the energy transfer is mainly along the fiber orientation direction. With the increase of the fiber orientation angle, the dip angle of kerfs increases as well, the width of burned carbon fibers on the surface does not essentially change, the temperature field becomes wider, and the maximum temperature decreases. When the single-layer CFRP with different resin contents are cut, the width of heat affected zone and the maximum temperature both have approximately linear relationships with the resin content. Compared with the experimental results, the average errors from numerical simulations for the burned zone width and the heat affected zone width on carbon fiber surface are 10.66% and 13.09%, respectively.