A total coloring of a graph G is a coloring of all elements of G, i.e. vertices and edges, in such a way that no two adjacent or incident elements receive the same color. Many combinatorial problems can be efficiently solved for partial k-trees, that is, graphs of treewidth bounded by a constant k. However, no polynomial-time algorithm has been known for the problem of finding a total coloring of a given partial k-tree with the minimum number of colors. This paper gives such a first polynomial-time algorithm.