ABSTRACTIn this paper, we study the numerical solution of singularly perturbed degenerate parabolic convection–diffusion problem on a rectangular domain. The solution of the problem exhibits a parabolic boundary layer in the neighbourhood of x=0. First, we use the backward-Euler finite difference scheme to discretize the time derivative of the continuous problem on uniform mesh in the temporal direction. Then, to discretize the spatial derivatives of the resulting time semidiscrete problem, we apply the hybrid finite difference scheme, which is a combination of central difference scheme and midpoint upwind scheme on piecewise uniform Shishkin mesh. We derive the error estimates, which show that the proposed hybrid scheme is ϵ-uniform convergent of almost second-order (up to a logarithmic factor) in space and first-order in time. Some numerical results have been carried out to validate the theoretical results.