Au-Co supported on mesoporous silica materials SBA-15 was prepared with about 15 wt.% cobalt then deposition-precipitation with 2 wt.% Au. The results showed that while SBA-15 provided the long ordered arrangement of the channels for support, mixtures of cobalt oxides and gold nanoparticles are dispersed in the mesoporous channels. The sample exhibited excellent catalytic activity for toluene combustion, a complete decomposition (about 100%) of toluene had been achieved at the reaction temperature over 573 K and space velocity 30,000 h(-1). The kinetics showed that the activation energy of the sample was 96.06 kJ/mol (22.96 kcal/mol) and frequency factor was 1.05 x 10(10) s(-1), respectively. All these results indicate that while mesoporous materials give a high surface area support for metals, cobalt offers active supports for gold particles, which might be a combined way to overcome the shortcomings of low specific area for reducible transition metal oxides and low activity for inert oxides. Crown Copyright (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.