Membrane materials are most widely applied in construction engineering with small mass and high flexibility, it presents strong geometric nonlinearity in the process of vibration. In the paper, an improved multi-scale perturbation method is used to solve the aeroelastic stability of closed and open membrane roofs for quantify the effect of geometric nonlinearity on the single-mode aeroelastic instability wind speed of membrane roofs. The results show that the critical wind speed values of the two models are small when the geometrical nonlinearity of membrane material is neglected. In addition, under normal wind load, the influence of geometrical nonlinearity of membrane on the aerodynamic stability of roof can be neglected, However, under strong wind load, when the roof deformation reaches 3% of the span, the influence of geometric nonlinearity should be considered and the influence increases with the decrease of transverse and downwind span of membrane roof. The results obtained in this paper have important theoretical reference value for the design the membrane structures.