The minority carrier lifetime of the mercury cadmium telluride (HgCdTe) material is an important parameter that affects the performance of the HgCdTe infrared detector. Microwave photoconductivity decay (-PCD) and microwave detected photoconductivity (MDP) methods are used to study the minority carrier lifetime of HgCdTe thin films. The results show that with the increase of laser power, the minority carrier lifetime of the sample decreases; due to the change of the carrier recombination mechanism, the minority carrier lifetime of the HgCdTe thin film increases first and then decreases with the increase of temperature. The distribution and uniformity of the carrier concentration in different regions of the sample can be obtained through the minority carrier lifetime distribution of the HgCdTe thin film. For HgCdTe thin film materials, the surface distributions of the above two test results are similar.