An Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatographic(UPLC) method was developed for the separation and determination of formaldehyde,acetaldehyde,acetone,acrolein,propionaldehyde,crotonaldehyde,2 butanone,butyraldehyde in cigarette mainstream smoke.The targeted compounds in cigarette mainstream smoke were collected with a Cambridge fliter treated with acidic solution of 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine, and extracted with 50 mL 2% pyridine acetonitrile.The carbonyl compounds were separated on a KinetexTM C18 (150 mm×2.1 mm,2.6 μm) column,using water-acetonitrile(35∶65) mixed solution and water-acetonitrile-tetrahydrofuran-isopropyl alcohol(59∶30∶10∶1) as mobile phases by gradient elution.The eight carbonyl compounds were separated in 20 min and determined by UPLC with a diode array detector.The result indicated that the correlation coefficients(r2) of eight carbonyl compounds were not less than 0.999 97.The detection limits for the method were between 25.81 ng/cig and 67.74 ng/cig.The average recoveries were in the range of 95%-99% with relative standard deviations of 1.4%-5.8%.Compared with the YC/T 254-2008 standard method, the proposed method was faster, simpler and less consumption, and was applied in the determination of eight carbonyl compounds in twenty kinds of cigarette with satisfactory results.