Monte Carlo simulation is the most accurate method for absorbed dose calculations in radiotherapy. Its efficiency still requires improvement for routine clinical applications, especially for online adaptive radiotherapy. In this paper, we report our recent development on a GPU-based Monte Carlo dose calculation code for coupled electron-photon transport. We have implemented the dose planning method (DPM) Monte Carlo dose calculation package (Sempau et al 2000 Phys. Med. Biol. 45 2263-91) on the GPU architecture under the CUDA platform. The implementation has been tested with respect to the original sequential DPM code on the CPU in phantoms with water-lung-water or water-bone-water slab geometry. A 20 MeV mono-energetic electron point source or a 6 MV photon point source is used in our validation. The results demonstrate adequate accuracy of our GPU implementation for both electron and photon beams in the radiotherapy energy range. Speed-up factors of about 5.0-6.6 times have been observed, using an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card against a 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon CPU processor.