This paper focuses on describing the daily operation strategy of a tram powered by a hybrid system based on fuel cell stack and a battery pack. The daily operation strategy focusses on the hydrogen refueling and battery recharging timing in one-day operation of 18 h, combined with serval driving cycles and three operation modes. The battery state of charge balanced (SOC-) strategy and the dynamic programming (DP-) strategy are two proposed power allocation methods. For one-cycle operation, the latter save 6.6% hydrogen consumption than the former. As for one-day operation, a simplified DP-strategy is deduced to replace the DP-strategy and accelerate the calculation. It shares equivalent hydrogen consumption with the SOC-strategy but guarantees the durability of the fuel cell and prolongs the driving mileage. (C) 2017 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.