The adsorption of acid yellow 17 dye on activated carbon/alpha-Fe2O3 nanocomposite prepared by simple pyrolytic method using iron(II) gluconate was investigated by batch technique. The composite was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM). The size of iron oxide nanoparticles formed from iron(II) gluconate precursor is in the range 5-17 nm. The saturation magnetization (M-s), remanence (M-r) and coercivity (H-c) of the magnetic carbon nanocomposite is 5.6 emu/g, 1.14 emu/g and 448 Oe, respectively. The adsorption data are found to fit well with Langmuir and, fairly well with Freundlich and Ternpkin isotherms at higher concentration of dye (40-100 mg/L). Kinetics data indicate that the adsorption of dye follows pseudo-second order kinetics model. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.