Abstract Given a simple graph G = (V G , E G) with vertex set V G and edge set E G , the mixed graph G ˜ is obtained from G by orienting some of its edges. Let H (G ˜) denote the Hermitian adjacency matrix of G ˜ and A (G) be the adjacency matrix of G. The H -rank (resp. rank) of G ˜ (resp. G), written as r k (G ˜) (resp. r (G)), is the rank of H (G ˜) (resp. A (G)). Denote by d (G) the dimension of cycle space of G , that is d (G) = | E G | − | V G | + ω (G) , where ω (G) denotes the number of connected components of G. In this paper, we concentrate on the relation between the H -rank of G ˜ and the rank of G. We first show that − 2 d (G) ⩽ r k (G ˜) − r (G) ⩽ 2 d (G) for every mixed graph G ˜. Then we characterize all the mixed graphs that attain the above lower (resp. upper) bound. By these obtained results in the current paper, all the main results obtained in Luo et al. (2018); Wong et al. (2016) may be deduced consequently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]