The increasing importance of skeleton information in surveillance big data feature analysis demands significant storage space. The development of an effective and efficient solution for storage is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a new framework for the lossless compression of skeleton sequences by exploiting both spatial and temporal prediction and coding redundancies. Firstly, we propose a set of skeleton prediction modes, namely, spatial differential-based, motion vector-based, relative motion vector-based, and trajectory-based skeleton prediction mode. These modes can effectively handle both spatial and temporal redundancies present in the skeleton sequences. Secondly, we further enhance performance by introducing a novel approach to handle coding redundancy. Our proposed scheme is able to significantly reduce the size of skeleton data while maintaining exactly the same skeleton quality due to lossless compression approach. Experiments are conducted on standard surveillance and Posetrack action datasets containing challenging test skeleton sequences. Our method obviously outperforms the traditional direct coding methods by providing an average of 73% and 66% bit-savings on the two datasets. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.