The characteristics and mechanism of unsteady aerodynamic heating of a transient hypersonic boundary layer caused by a sudden change in surface temperature are studied. The complete time history of wall heat flux is presented with both analytical and numerical approaches. With the analytical method, the unsteady compressible boundary layer equation is solved. In the neighborhood of the initial and final steady states, the transient responses can be expressed with a steady-state solution plus a perturbation series. By combining these two solutions, a complete solution in the entire time domain is achieved. In the region in which the analytical approach is applicable, numerical results are in good agreement with the analytical results, showing reliability of the methods. The result shows two distinct features of the unsteady respouse. In a short period just after a sudden increase in the wall temperature, the direction of the wall heat flux is reverted,and a new inflexion near the wall occurs in the profile of the thermal boundary layer. This is a typical unsteady characteristic. However, these unsteady responses only exist in a very short period in hypersonic flows, meaning that, in a long-term aerodynamic heating process considering only unsteady surface temperature, the unsteady characteristics of the flow can be ignored, and the traditional quasi-steady aerodynamic heating prediction methods are still valid.