Rhodiola L. has a long history of use in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and has shown great promise in recent clinical trials. Salidroside and tyrosol are two important active compounds present in this TCM. In this work, microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) followed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with a photodiode array detector (DAD) was developed for quantitative analysis of salidroside and tyrosol in Rhodiola L. samples. After systematical investigation, the optimal experimental parameters of soak time (60 min), extraction solvent volume (1g sample, 5 mL), extract solvent composition (50% methanol/water), microwave power (400 W) and extraction time (5 min) were investigated. The optimized method provided satisfactory precision (R.S.D. values less than 7.5%), good recovery (from 94.4 to 123%), and good linear relation in the range of 5.0-500 microg/mL for salidroside and 1.0-100 microg/mL for tyrosol (R2>0.999). The proposed method was applied to quantitative analysis of salidroside and tyrosol in Rhodiola L. samples from five different growing areas. To demonstrate the method feasibility, recirculation was also used to analyze salidroside and tyrosol in Rhodiola L. samples. The proposed MAE-HPLC-DAD is a simple, rapid and low-cost method for quantitative analysis of salidroside and tyrosol, and a potential tool for quality assessment of Rhodiola L. sample.