There are several methods for the hydrogen production such as steam reforming of natural gas, photochemical method, biological method, electrolysis and thermochemical method, etc. These days it has been widely studied for the hydrogen production method having low hydrogen production cost and high efficiency. In this paper, patents in the hydrogen production by steam reforming of natural gas were gathered and analyzed. The search range was limited in the open patents of USA(US), European Union(EP), Japan(JP), and Korea(KR) from 1996 to 2006. Patents were gathered by using key-words searching and extracted by filtering criteria. The trends of the patents was analyzed by the years, countries, companies, and technologies.