Rice bean [ Vigna umbellata (Thunb.) Ohwi and Ohashi] is an understudied crop grown on poor soils in East Asia. Since no simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers have been developed for rice bean, our goal was to evaluate genomic SSR markers from mung bean ( Vigna radiata L. Wilczek) and to provide basic tools for genetic study of rice bean. A total of 2,540 pairs of newly developed SSR primers from mung bean were tested to determine their transferability and polymorphism in rice bean. The results showed that 787 primers pairs ( Vr markers) could be used to successfully amplify rice bean DNA loci. Of these markers, 47 showed reliable banding and polymorphisms among 24 rice bean accessions. These SSR markers were further analyzed using 230 accessions from a rice bean core collection held in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science: 165 alleles were detected in the accessions, and the number of alleles varied from 2 to 6 with a mean of 3.51 per locus. The PIC values varied from 0.042 to 0.711 and averaged 0.418. Population structure analysis indicated that these 230 rice bean genotypes could be divided into six clusters, somewhat in agreement with the eco-regions across 12 different provinces where rice bean is originally collected. The present study supplies a set of useful group of SSR markers to accelerate the genetic study of rice bean and provide information for breeding program design.