•A background and exhaustive survey on fingerprint matching methods in the literature is presented.•A taxonomy of fingerprint minutiae-based methods is proposed.•An extensive experimental study shows the performance of the state-of-the-art. Fingerprint recognition has found a reliable application for verification or identification of people in biometrics. Globally, fingerprints can be viewed as valuable traits due to several perceptions observed by the experts; such as the distinctiveness and the permanence on humans and the performance in real applications. Among the main stages of fingerprint recognition, the automated matching phase has received much attention from the early years up to nowadays. This paper is devoted to review and categorize the vast number of fingerprint matching methods proposed in the specialized literature. In particular, we focus on local minutiae-based matching algorithms, which provide good performance with an excellent trade-off between efficacy and efficiency. We identify the main properties and differences of existing methods. Then, we include an experimental evaluation involving the most representative local minutiae-based matching models in both verification and evaluation tasks. The results obtained will be discussed in detail, supporting the description of future directions.