In order to know the effect of surface irregularity in the detection of local wall thinning of pipeline using pulsed eddy current (PEC), the lift-off effects on PEC signal have been investigated. Three kinds of parameters in the PEC signal, which is "peak amplitude", "time to peak amplitude" and "time to zero crossing" are analyzed to separate the lift-off effects in the PEC signal. The distance from sensor to the bottom of sample which is the total thickness of combined insulator and sample is kept constant. The magnitude of the differential peak amplitude is increased with increasing sample thickness, the time to peak amplitude is increased with increasing the sample thickness. To determine the effect of lift-off, a number of balanced transient responses combining wall thinning locations and lift-off distances were plotted.