A liquid-liquid extraction step has been incorporated into an automatic method for determination of europium in the presence of other lanthanides, yttrium and scandium. Europium(III) is selectively reduced on a Jones reductor and the europium(II) reacted with molybdophosphoric acid to produce a molybdenum blue which is extracted into isoamyl alcohol for spectrophotometric determination. Incorporation of the extraction step increases the sensitivity of the method by a factor of 5 enabling from 2 to 50 μg of europium per ml of aqueous sample solution to be determined but reduces the sampling rate from 20 to 10 samples per hour. The method has been applied to the determination of europium in lanthanide oxides and in the minerals bastnasite and monazite following a lanthanide group separation.