Abstract The lifetime of a carrier is a crucial parameter for solar cell materials, and metal halide perovskite materials are promising for solar cell applications. In this study, we observed carrier recombination using time-resolved photoluminescence (TR-PL) and microwave photoconductivity decay (μ-PCD) in metal halide perovskite materials: NH₃CH₃PbI₃ (MAPbI₃), NH₃CH₃PbBr₃ (MAPbBr₃), and CsPbBr₃ with single- and poly-crystalline structures. By comparing the decay curves of TR-PL and μ-PCD, we found trap levels in the band gap for all the materials. We employed two excitation wavelengths for the μ-PCD measurements, and we observed faster μ-PCD signal decays for short wavelength excitation for MAPbBr₃ and CsPbBr₃. Additionally, we established that the poly-crystals exhibited faster decay compared with the single crystals for MAPbBr₃ and CsPbBr₃. Therefore, we concluded that there are significant contributions of the interface and surface recombination on carrier recombination for MAPbBr₃ and CsPbBr₃, but not for MAPbI₃.