A high impedance fault(HIF) is one of the serious problems facing the electric utility industry today. Because of the high impedance of a downed conductor under some conditions these faults are not easily detected by over-current based protection devices and can cause fires and personal hazard. In this paper a new method for detection of HIF which uses adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is proposed. Since arcing fault current shows different changes during high and low voltage portion of conductor voltage waveform we firstly divided one cycle of fault current into equal spanned four data windows according to the mangnitude of conductor voltage. Fast fourier transform(FFT) is applied to each data window and the frequency spectrum of current waveform are chosen asinputs of ANFIS after input selection method is preprocessed. Using staged fault and normal data ANFIS is trained to discriminate between normal and HIF status by hybrid learning algorithm. This algorithm adapted gradient descent and least square method and shows rapid convergence speed and improved convergence error. The proposed method represent good performance when applied to staged fault data and HIFLL(high impedance like load)such as arc-welder.