The harmful residual monomers present in acrylic pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs), used in transdermal drug delivery system (TDDS), should be quantified through a simple, rapid and accurate method. This paper introduces an optimized method for the determination of the residual monomers in acrylic polymers based on a gas chromatographic (GC) technique. Acetone was shown to be the optimum extraction solvent and the extraction time was 80 min. The recovery, precision, accuracy, limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) of the method were also studied. The method was relatively accurate and precise with recoveries ranging from 93.2 to 102.7% for each monomer with a relative standard deviation of (% RSD)< 7%. The method proposed in this paper for the determination of residual monomers in solvent-based acrylic PSAs is simple, accuracy and easy to carry out. (C) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010