We have fabricated and tested superconducting first‐order gradiometers made from YBa2Cu3O7−&dgr;(YBCO) thin‐film flux transformers coupled to YBCO dc SQUIDs. The flux transformers consisted of 10‐turn input coils with 5‐&mgr;m linewidth and two pick‐up loops with 600‐&mgr;m linewidth, each of which surrounded an area of 2.1 by 2.8 mm. All levels were patterned by wet etching. A magnetic field gradient of 1 nT/m resulted in a flux of 5.8×10−4&Fgr; in the SQUID which corresponds to a responsivity of 1.21×10−9m3. The 1/fnoise level at 77 K and 10 Hz was 0.6 nT/m&sqrt;Hz and was dominated by SQUID noise.