An experimental study of the minority carrier lifetime in a finite base HgCdTe n -on-p photodiode using pulse recovery technique (PRT) is presented in this paper. The reverse recovery storage time (ts) is functions of the forward current IF and reverse current IR. Average minority carrier (electron) lifetimes (τn) calculated from ts and IF/IR strongly increases with decreasing ratio of the base thickness to the diffusion length. The minority carrier (electron) lifetime extracted from the conventional theory is approximately 28 ns at 77 K, much less than the value of 51 ns obtained when short base effects are considered in the analysis. This reveals that the base thickness of the photodiode is an important parameter for the minority carrier lifetime measurement using PRT. The infinite base assumption is valid only if the base thickness is larger than about three times the diffusion length of minority carriers.