A simple and specific high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was developed for the pharmacokinetic study of vitexin-4″-O-glucoside (VOG) in rats after oral administration. The plasma samples were deproteinised with methanol after the addition of an internal standard, hesperidin. HPLC analysis was performed on a Diamonsil C(18) analytical column, using methanol -0.5% aqueous phosphoric acid (45:55, v/v) as the mobile phase with ultraviolet detection at 330 nm. The calibration curve was linear over the range of 5-450 µg mL(-1) in rat plasma. The average extraction recovery of VOG was 98.74% ± 0.44%, and the relative standard deviations of the intra- and inter-day precisions were not greater than 4.1% and 2.0%, respectively. The validated method was successfully applied during a pharmacokinetic study in rats after oral administration of VOG at different doses, and all the results indicated that the pharmacokinetics of VOG in rats obeyed nonlinear processes.