Abstract: There is evaluation deviation in quantifying the river hydrological regime characteristic variation by the IHA method,which is caused by inter-correlations between indicators and data redundancy. Therefore, in this paper we selected a set of representative indicators from 32 IHA indicators by principal component analysis on the basis of the daily runoff data from1952 to 2017 obtained from Huatan hydrological station. The preferred indexes were 30-day minimum flow, base flow index, water fall rate, water rise rate, date of maximum flow, high pulse count and date of minimum flow. The results showed that:① there were weak correlations between 7 representative indicators,and the evaluation results by 7 representative indicators were basically the same as the results by IHA method. ② the selected representative indicators could provide more comprehensive and reasonable hydrological regime evaluation results, which was significant for water resources management.