This paper discusses about the effects of bit plane extraction in fingerprint recognition. An alternative approach to recognise a fingerprint from extracted bit plane is analysed in attempt to find the best bit plane used for recognition. An 8-bit greyscale fingerprint image is extracted into 8 different bit planes. Each bit plane of the images is then used as the input image for recognition. A fingerprint recognition algorithm using phase-only correlation (POC) is applied on the extracted bit planes. Based on the results of the analysis, the average recognition rate achieved in bit plane 7 is higher compared to the other bit planes. Three hundred samples of fingerprint images from FingerDOS are used for the experimental purposes.