Currently, most of electroless nickel phosphorus plating on magnesium alloys has following disadvantages. First, it has been suffering from corrosion issues caused by acidic electroless bath. Second, in order to increase the strength of Ni-P coatings to the Mg substrate, the pretreatments for electroless Ni-P employ hydrofluoric acid (HF) and hexavalent chromium (Cr6+) which can cause pollution and health problems . In this paper, we developed HF-free and alkaline electroless Ni-P deposition process on AZ91D magnesium alloy which avoids the use of SO42- and Cl- ions in the electroless plating bath, thus leading to good adhesion and corrosion resistance of electroless Ni-P coating on magnesium alloy. XRD, SEM, EDS techniques were used to study the structure, morphology, and chemical compositions of the conversion coating and Ni-P coating, respectively. Polarization measurements indicated that the corrosion rate of Ni-P coated Mg was six times lower than that of bare Mg. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) also showed that the Ni-P coating could effectively protect Mg alloy from corrosion.