Disclosed is a perpendicular magnetic recording medium comprising at least a backing layer, an alignment control layer, a magnetic recording layer and a protective layer on a non-magnetic substrate. The alignment control layer is composed of three or more layers including a seed layer, a first intermediate layer and a second intermediate layer sequentially arranged from the substrate side. The crystal grains constituting the first intermediate layer are epitaxially grown on the crystal grains of the seed layer, and the crystal grains constituting the second intermediate layer are epitaxially grown on the crystal grains of the first intermediate layer. The crystal grains constituting the second intermediate layer are finer than the crystal grains constituting the first intermediate layer.