Abstract To tackle the challenge of lifespan reduction in lithium batteries during frequency modulation, this study introduces a novel Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction methodology. The proposed approach integrates Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks, thereby efficiently synthesizing data from both operational parameters and capacity metrics. Firstly, VMD is utilized to decompose the initial capacity data of lithium batteries into separate components characterized by high and low frequencies. Subsequently, for the high-frequency elements, GRU is employed for rolling iterative prediction, while for the low-frequency elements, features are extracted from the operational data and inputted into GRU for prediction. Finally, the component prediction results are restored to obtain capacity prediction values. Validation conducted using the NASA dataset shows that the root mean square error of capacity prediction is minimized to 0.0122, with a corresponding minimum average absolute error of 0.0096, and RUL prediction errors are generally within 2 cycles.