Metal oxide surge arresters are one of the most important equipment for power system protection against switching and lightning over-voltages. High-energy stresses and environmental features are the main factors which degrade surge arresters. In order to verify surge arresters good condition, their monitoring is necessary. The majority of surge arrester monitoring techniques is based on total leakage current decomposition of their capacitive and resistive components. This paper introduces a new approach based on time-delay addition method to extract the resistive current from the total leakage current without measuring voltage signal. Surge arrester model for calculating leakage current has been performed in ATP–EMTP. In addition, the signal processing has been done using MATLAB software. To show the accuracy of the proposed method, experimental tests have been performed to extract resistive leakage current by the proposed method.