The zero-frequency component (ZFC) distributes widely and carries no phase information of the object in off-axis hologram, which significantly reduces the signal-to-noise ratio and thus decreases the accuracy of the reconstruction result. To suppress ZFC, existing methods need record multiple holograms or suffer from manually adjustment of hologram decomposition layer to achieve optimal results. Laplace operator is also used to suppress ZFC but it is difficult to extract the +1 level. To overcome these problems, a Hilbert-Huang transform based method is proposed that only needs one hologram and avoids manually adjusting the layer of decomposition. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the frequency spectrum of the hologram processed by the proposed method is compared with the frequency spectrum of the hologram without ZFC suppression, the hologram suppressed with Haar wavelet transform and Laplace operator. Three regions in the corrected phase maps of the holograms are randomly selected to obtain the standard deviations and sectional diagram. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively suppress the ZFC and performs better than other two methods.