Although allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation from an HLA-matched sibling donor (MSD) is a potentially curative post-remission treatment for adults with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in their first CR, transplant-related morbidity and mortality remains a major drawback. We retrospectively compared the outcomes of patients who underwent autologous peripheral blood stem cell transplantation (auto-PBSCT; n= 375) with those who underwent allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (allo-BMT; n= 521) and allo-PBSCT (n= 380) from MSDs for adults with AML/CR1, in which propensity score models were used to adjust selection biases among patients, primary physicians and institutions to overcome ambiguity in the patients’ background information. Both the multivariate analysis and propensity score models indicated that the leukemia-free survival rate of auto-PBSCT was not significantly different from that of allo-BMT (hazard ratio (HR), 1.23; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.92 to 1.66; P= 0.16) and allo-PBSCT (HR, 1.13; 95% CI, 0.85–1.51; P= 0.40). The current results suggest that auto-PBSCT remains a promising alternative treatment for patients with AML/CR1 in the absence of an available MSD.