An optimized and validated spectrophotometric method has been described for the quantitative analysis of uranyl ion in soil samples. The method is based on the chelation of uranyl ion with piroxicam to produce a yellow complex in 1,4-dioxan-water medium at room temperature which absorbs maximally at 390 nm. Beer's law is obeyed in the concentration range of 6.75 x 10(-2) - 9.45 x 10(-1) mu g mL(-1) with apparent molar absorptivity and Sandell's sensitivity of 4.114 x 10(5) L/mol/cm and 0.00066 mu g/cm(2)/0.001 absorbance unit, respectively. Interference due to various non-target ions was also investigated. The proposed method was successfully applied to the analysis of uranyl ion in synthetic soil samples. The validity of the proposed method was checked by applying the standard addition technique in addition to a comparison with the results obtained from other earlier reported methods.