XML documents are semi-structured data, and XML frequent path mining can be divided into two steps: XML document serialization and sequence mining. The existing serialization method expresses the XML document as a set of Xpath paths with a plenty of node redundancy. Algorithms based on Apriori require multiple scanning of the database and can generate a large number of candidate sets. The PrefixSpan algorithm generates a large number of projection databases, occupying a lot of memory space. In view of the shortcomings of the existing algorithms used in XML frequent path mining, this paper proposes an efficient mining algorithm called Prefix-based XML Frequent Path Mining Algorithm (PXFP). The PXFP algorithm traverses the XML document tree in a breadth-first manner and represents each node as “node: parent node”, which reduces the node redundancy. The PXFP does not generate the projection database, but only gets the sub-node of the prefix, and then increases the length of the frequent pattern by the position information of the frequent sub-path, which reduces scanning the database. The experimental results show that the PXFP algorithm achieves higher time and space efficiency than the PrefixSpan algorithm.