Abstract: In this paper, a technique for compressing Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) raw data using block lifting wavelet transform is considered. Due to the statistical properties of SAR signal, a proper subband bit allocation strategy is presented. At high bit rates and low bit rates, the uniform and non-uniform Lloyd-Max quantizer optimized for Gaussian statistics is respectively used to quantize the wavelet coefficients in order to get the optimum quantization gain. The performances achieved in terms of bit rate reduction and certain quality parameters have been evaluated. These show an increased performance in this method with respect to conventional methods.