The US Senate Intelligence Committee approved the nomination of General Hayden, 61, by 12 votes to three.
The nomination must be confirmed by the general Senate in a vote scheduled later this week.
"I believe that we can get this nomination on the floor and approved before the end of the week if my Democrat colleagues will join with us in a bipartisan way to fill this critical national security position," said the chairman of the committee, Republican Senator Pat Roberts.
In committee hearings, Gen. Hayden promised to defend the key civilian spy agency that has been battered by intense criticism and infighting since the September 11, 2001 attacks and the US invasion of Iraq.
If confirmed, Gen. Hayden will replace Porter Goss, who resigned several weeks ago.
Mr Hayden, who rose up in the Pentagon intelligence bureaucracy starting from the Cold War, served during 1999-2005 as head of the ultra-secret electronic spying-focused National Security Agency.
In 2005 he was named deputy to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, who himself was charged in the new position with shaking up the entire national intelligence apparatus in the wake of the failure to detect the September 11 plot.
Hayden criticised
In the Senate hearings, opposition Democrats criticised Gen. Hayden for overseeing the White House-authorised NSA telephone eavesdropping program that some lawmakers have branded as illegal.
Democratic Senator Russ Feingold said he voted against the nomination because Mr Hayden had overseen NSA eavesdropping without court warrants and the tracking of Americans' phone records.
"Our country needs a CIA director who is committed to fighting terrorism aggressively without breaking the law or infringing on the rights of Americans," Senator Feingold said.
"General Hayden's role in implementing and publicly defending the warrantless surveillance program does not give me confidence that he is capable of fulfilling this important responsibility."
A New York Times report in December that the NSA was eavesdropping on calls to international destinations without court-approved warrants sparked sharp criticism by lawmakers and civil liberties groups.
Several days after the White House announced Mr Hayden's nomination, USA Today reported that the NSA was tracking the domestic phone records of millions of Americans, reviving the debate about whether the US administration had overstepped legal boundaries in its efforts to counter possible terrorist threats.
Several opposition Democrats on the committee said they had voted for Gen. Hayden because he had displayed "independence" previously, noting that he had not shied away from disagreeing with the Department of Defence and the White House.
"The most important issue to me is whether or not General Hayden is going to be independent and objective when he delivers his intelligence assessments to the president," said Democratic Senator Carl Levin.
The senator said that a former CIA director, George Tenet, had failed to show independence, and accused him of having "distorted the intelligence" in the run-up to the war in Iraq "in order to please the White House."