A 4-year retrospective study was performed to determine the clinical, bacteriological and epidemiological aspects of acute clinical mastitis in seven Israeli dairy herds. A total of 1124 clinical mastitis cases were detected by abnormal changes in the milk and udder with concurrent decrease of at least 25% in daily milk production. A total of 1190 quarters were affected with clinical mastitis in 1089 cows. The rear quarters had a higher incidence risk (64.7% of quarter cases) than the front quarters. The annual herd-year-incidence varied from 4.2 to 126.8 cases/100 cows/year. The whole-lactation incidence risk (LIR) was 20.8 per 100 lactations. LIR increased from the first to fifth lactation and then decreased. Most clinical mastitis cases were associated with coliform bacteria (60.2% of cases), environmental streptococci (18.6%), coagulase-negative staphylococci (8.7%) and samples from which no bacterial growth was detected (8.1%). Most cases of clinical mastitis occurred in the early stages of lactation, with 51.4% of all cases, 52.3% of coliform cases and 54.6% of environmental streptococci mastitis cases occurring during the first 4 months of lactation. The median days in milk at diagnosis was 118 days. The incidence was lower in the dry summer months. The ratio of peak to low incidence was 1.62 with a calculated peak incidence in January.