The preparation of epitaxial Au(lll) films on mica by means of direct current magnetron sputtering is reported. We employed low-energy electron diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and scanning tunneling microscopy to study the surface structure of sputtered gold films at various deposition temperatures and substrate cleaning procedures. It will be shown that by sputter deposition at 400 degrees C onto oxygen annealed mica substrates uniformly textured gold films can be obtained which typically exhibit step-free, atomically hat areas of about 150x150 nm(2).