A sensitive method for simultaneous determination of dithionate and sulfate using ion chromatography equipped with a suppressed conductivity detector was developed. The flow rate was 1.2 mL min(-1), and the mobile phase contained KOH, which was gradient-generated by an automatic generator. The detection limits were 0.63 and 0.42 mg L-1 for dithionate and sulfate, respectively. The correlation coefficients of the calibration curves were greater than 0.997. The linearity ranges were 5-200 mg L-1, and the accuracies were in the range of 99.5-111%. The proposed method was rapid, accurate, and fully validated. Finally, the method was successfully applied to the analysis of the leaching liquid and slurry by SO2 leaching pyrolusite.