A Gram-staining-positive, strictly aerobic, spherical, non-motile, red-pigmented bacterium, designated strain MK03(T), was isolated from a soil sample collected in South Korea. The taxonomic position of the novel strain was investigated using a polyphasic approach. In phylogenetic analyses based on 16S rRNA gene sequences, strain MK03(T) was placed in a clade formed by members of the genus Deinococcus in the family Deinococcaceae and appeared to be most closely related to Deinococcus aerolatus 5516T-9(T) (97.4% sequence similarity), Deinococcus marmoris AA-63(T) (97.2%), Deinococcus radiopugnans ATCC 19172(T) (97.2%) and Deinococcus saxicola AA-1444(T) (96.9%). The genomic DNA G+C content of the novel strain was 64.5 mol%. The chemotaxonomic characteristics of strain MK03(T) were typical of members of the genus Deinococcus: MK-8 was identified as the predominant respiratory quinine, the major fatty acids were C(16:1)ω7c, C(15:1)ω6c, C(16:0) and C(15:0, )ornithine was found to be the diamino acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan and the novel strain showed resistance to gamma radiation, with a D(10) value (i.e. the dose required to reduce the bacterial population by 10-fold) in excess of 9 kGy. In hybridization experiments, only low DNA-DNA relatedness values (11.6-34.5%) were recorded between the novel strain and its closest relatives in the genus Deinococcus. Based on the phylogenetic, chemotaxonomic, phenotypic and DNA-DNA relatedness data, strain MK03(T) represents a novel species of the genus Deinococcus, for which the name Deinococcus humi sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is MK03(T) ( = KCTC 13619(T) = JCM 17915(T)).