Small-angle x-ray scattering is used to study size distributions of noble metal nanoparticles embedded in polyelectrolyte hydrogels with oppositely charged surfactants. A procedure is proposed to subtract matrix scattering and to extract pure scattering due to the nanoparticles allowing to evaluate their size distribution functions by means of a regularization technique. Two kinds of collapsed gel-surfactant complexes were studied: a complex of a cationic gel of poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride) with an anionic surfactant sodium dodecyl sulfate (PDADMACl/SDS), and that of an anionic gel of poly(methacrylic acid) with a cationic surfactant cetylpyridinium chloride (PMA/CPC). Addition of a gold compound (HAuCl4. 3H(2)O) to the PDADMACl/SDS system forms the metal compound clusters and leads to a partial distortion of the gel structure. After subsequent reduction of the gold compound with sodium borohydride (NaBH4) ordering in the gel disappears and gold nanoparticles are formed. Their size distribution includes a fraction of small particles with approximately the same size as the compound clusters before reduction and a fraction of larger particles with the radii up to 40 nm. For the collapsed PDADMACl/SDS gels, aging does not change the size distribution profile; for the noncollapsed PDADMACl gels without surfactant, metal particles are found to grow with time. This suggests that the aggregation of metal colloids is prevented by the ordering in the collapsed gel-surfactant complex. The addition of HAuCl4. 3H(2)O and the subsequent reduction of the metal ions in the PMA/CPC system does not distort the gel structure as the degree of incorporation of AuCl4- ions is very low. Particle sizes in the PMA/CPC system are found to be somewhat larger than those in the PDADMACl/SDS system. The PDADMACl/SDS gels loaded with the PtCl4 compound were also studied to analyze the influence of the reducing agent type on the particle size distribution distributions. Fast reduction with NaBH4 yielded mostly small particles with the radii around 2 nm grown from the compound clusters similar to those observed for the gold-loaded gels. In contrast, slow reduction with N2H4. H2O was found to produce larger nanoparticles and the size distribution function shows a major fraction of the particles with the radii up to 30 nm.