The objective of this paper is to introduce a distance measure for intuitionistic fuzzy numbers. Firstly the existing distance measures for intuitionistic fuzzy sets are analyzed and compared with the help of some examples. Then the new distance measure for intuitionistic fuzzy numbers is proposed based on interval difference. Also in particular the type of distance measure for triangle intuitionistic fuzzy numbers is described. The metric properties of the proposed measure are also studied. Some numerical examples are considered for applying the proposed measure and finally the result is compared with the existing ones