In order to improve the accuracy of iris recognition further, an iris recognition method based on the maximal responding orientation of phase congruency is proposed. Firstly,the normalized iris images are obtained by preprocessing eye images. Then, the maximal responding orientation of phase congruency for each pixel is extracted and the numbers of maximal responding orientation is encoded into a simple binary iris code that is easy to be processed. Finally, the difference of two iris codes is measured through weighted Hamming distance and the recognition results are given. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has the equal error rate of 0.871　5% and the correct recognition rate of 99.851 8%. Compared with the classical methods, the proposed method has a higher accuracy.