Poor germination and labor intensive thinning of seedling after sowing are major deterrents in Setaria viridis production. Seed priming has the potential to improve the seedling emergence and economic feasibility by combined with seed coating for optimizing mechanized growing technologies to small cereal crops. The objective of this study was to determine the effective seed priming conditions on the improved germination in the laboratory. Seeds were hydro primed with distilled water for 6, 12, 24 hours and osmoprimed with PEG8000 (-0.15 MPa and -0.3 MPa), KCl (1% and 2%), KH2PO4 (0.5% and 1.0%), KNO3(1.0% and 3.0%), CaCl2 (1.0% and 3.0%) solutions for 6, 12, 24 hours at 15℃. Our results demonstrate that treating S. viridis seeds with PEG -0.3 MPa solution for 12h increased to maximum germination percentage to 97%, whereas the lowest germination percentage observed in seeds which treated with by CaCl2 1.0% for 24h and KCl 1% for 6h. Priming reduced the mean germination times (MGT) of all priming treated seeds statistically comparing to control. There was significant interaction between treatment and time. Further studies for field performance of primed seeds are needed.