Compression of digital holograms is a major challenge that needs to be resolved to enable the efficient storage, transmission and rendering of macroscopic holographic signals. In this work, we propose to deploy the wave atom transform that has been utilized before for interferometric modalities such as acoustic and seismic signals. This non-adaptive multi- resolution transform has good space-frequency localization and its orthonormal basis is suitable for sparsifying holographic signals. By replacing the CDF 9/7 wavelet transform stage in a JPEG 2000 codec with the proposed wave atom transform, we did assess its suitability for coding complex amplitude wavefronts. Experimental results demonstrate improved rate-distortion performance with respect to JPEG 2000 and H.265/HEVC for a set of computer-generated, diffuse, macroscopic holograms.