The separation of phenol from micellar solutions using micellar-enhanced ultrafiltration (MEUF) with polyether sulfone membrane was studied. Anionic sodium dodecylulfate (SDS), nonionic triton X-100 (TX-100) and three cationic surfactants, cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB), octadecyldimethylammonium bromide (OTAB) as well as cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) were used. Several important parameters including distribution coefficient (D), concentration of phenol dissolved in the micelles (O-m) and concentration of surfactant in micelle phase (S-m) were determined to evaluate separation efficiency of phenol from various surfactant micelles with different hydrophilic head group and hydrophobic tail length. It was found that the rejection and D of phenol examined with CTAB micelles were the highest, while that with TX-100 were lower than SDS at feed surfactant concentration of 10 mM. The rejection and D of phenol as well as O-m with three cationic surfactants could be ranked as follows: OTAB > CTAB > CPC, which was contrary to the permeate flux. The rejections of three surfactants were extremely similar with the range of feed surfactant concentration from 1 mM to 30 mM, and S-m examined with OTAB and CPC was higher than that with CTAB. Crown Copyright (c) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.