The phase comparison between fault feeder and healthy feeder is one of important criteria in fault line selection for neutral non-effective grounding systems. A new criterion for earth fault line selection with phase comparison statistical method is presented based on the detailed analysis for transient process of non-solidly earthed network. The complex wavelet transform is directly adopted to extract each zero-sequence current's phase of sub-band signals that can accurately select earth fault line after the statistical comparison of every line's phase. All information of special frequency band is sufficiently utilized and the algorithm proposed is simple. The detecting process with the new criterion is not sensitive for disturbance and immune to earth mode， path resistance and inception angles. Numerical simulation results have shown the validity and reliability of the algorithm proposed.