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Owing to an increasing need of control community for providing a precise and integrated model of natural and practical structures switching systems have attracted much attention. On the other hand, the multi-model inherent in many practical systems has increased the importance of reviewing these types of systems. In this paper, the problem of adaptive fault tolerant finite-time control of a class of nonlinear switching systems in the presence of actuator fault, external disturbances and dead-zone input nonlinearity is investigated. The boundary of the uncertain terms of the system is assumed to be unknown and adaptive rules are used to eliminate the destructive effects of these terms on the system response. The subsystems of switching system are considered as nonlinear systems with a canonical structure. This paper sets no restrictive assumption on the switching logic of the system. Therefore, the purpose is to propose a controller that works under any desired switch signal and can overcome the actuator fault, disturbances and dead-zone input nonlinearity. To achieve this purpose, after providing a smooth sliding manifold, an adaptive control input is developed such that the system trajectories approach the prescribed sliding mode dynamics in finite-time sense. Finally, by using the Lyapunov stability theory, it is proved that the origin is the finite-time stable equilibrium point of the overall closed-loop system. The simulation results provided by MATLAB software show the performance of the proposed controller.