Summary Arbitrarily wide-angle wave equations (AWWEs) are capable of imaging steep dips in heterogeneous media and convenient in numerical calculations, which enable them to be powerful tools for migration. The seismic wave modeling and migration are always carried out in a limited space, so an effective absorbing boundary condition (ABC) is required to avoid spurious edge reflections. In spite of an extensive utilization of perfectly matched layer (PML) in full wave equation, applications of PML for one-way wave equation (OWWE) are rare. In this abstract we derive a PML formulation for 3D scalar AWWEs to provide a good approach to suppress the undesired edge reflections. We finally formulate the PML in terms of a split field in the time domain and give out the discrete scheme using finite-difference method. Several numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness of the derived PML condition.