Epidemiological and clinical studies in the recent years have shown that the importance of the indoor air quality to human health should not be underestimated. The assessment of indoor quality requires efficient and reliable methods producing useful information particularly on that related to indoor dust. A significant task in designing mitigation or prevention measures is to identify firstly the classes of compounds that are present in house dust and secondly obtain their contribution in the samples particularly that of low-volatile or non-volatile organic compounds, for which sparse data is available. Extraction of house dust can be used as a screening method for high boiling organic compounds in the indoor environment. Most published work so far, on organic compounds of low volatility and on particulate organic matter has been focused on a few classes of compounds of known toxicity. However, the absence of knowledge on other possibly present classes of compounds could be crucial in determining the extent of exposure. To override this lack of knowledge, the present study introduces a new method based on supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) to detect the classes of the low-volatile or non-volatile organic compounds that are present in the house-dust samples. The application of the particular method of SFE with CO2 can help to extract and analyze a broad range of low volatile organic compounds in dust of indoor environments, which can lead effectively to a more complete characterization. The particular extraction/analytical method for organics in house dust has been set up consisting of a two step supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) with CO2 and CO2 + 5% of methanol, collection of the extracts on ODS trap, elution of the extracted compounds with methanol and n-hexane and GC/MS analysis of the eluates. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.