A high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the quantitation of cetirizine in human plasma is presented. The method is based on liquid-liquid extraction with dichloromethane and reversed-phase chromatography with spectrophotometric detection at 232 nm. Gradient elution was used to remove late eluting peaks. Diazepam was used as the internal standard. The limit of quantitation was 10 ng/ml using 0.5 ml of plasma. Within-day and between-day precision expressed by relative standard deviation was less than 10% and inaccuracy did not exceed 8%. The assay was applied to the analysis of samples from a pharmacokinetic study.