The Hartley transform based feature extraction method is proposed for fingerprint matching. Hartley transform is applied on a smaller region that has been cropped around the core point. The performance of this proposed method is evaluated based on the standard database of Bologna University and the database of the FVC2002. We used the city block distance to compute the similarity between the test fingerprint and database fingerprint image. The results obtained are compared with the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based method. The experimental results show that, the proposed method reduces the false acceptance rate (FAR) from 21.48% to 16.74 % based on the database of Bologna University and from 31.29% to 28.69% based on the FVC2002 database.