The presence of emerging contaminants such as antibiotics is currently urging the search of new techniques to efficiently remove them from the environment. In this work, the exceptional ability of a cholinium-based ionic liquid to salt out aqueous solutions of non-ionic surfactants containing tetracycline and oxytetracycline has been demonstrated. The deep characterization of the phase diagrams has allowed implementing the process with an antibiotic-polluted effluent, reaching extraction levels higher than 96%. The viability of the proposed strategy has been checked in a urine-type effluent and real swine wastewater stream, observing that no important alterations are detected in the phase segregation capacity, and values of antibiotics removal over 70% are reached. The number of cycles that both the ionic liquid and the surfactant can be reused demonstrates the potential of the proposed process to be applied at a real swine wastewater. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.