A group contribution (GC) method is proposed to estimate the thermal conductivity of ionic liquids covering a wide range of temperature (273.15-353.15 K) and thermal conductivity (0.1050-0.2137 W m(-1) K-1) based on experimental data collected from literature. A good agreement between the calculated and literature data was obtained for total 286 data points of 36 ionic liquids with an average absolute deviation (AAD) of 1.66%. The group contribution method developed in this paper offers a simple but reliable approach for estimating thermal conductivity for new ionic liquids in a wide temperature range at atmospheric pressure. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.