Eleven rare earth elements (REE) have been determined in ten USGS and two CCRMP igneous rock standards using high performance ion chromatography. Duplicate analyses of two or more separately prepared aliquots of each sample were undertaken; reproducibility was better than 5% for each of the REE. In most cases, the results compare closely with published REE values for those samples for which the REE are well characterised. Where the results for individual elements are in disagreement with published data, the more erratic patterns yielded by the earlier data when plotted on chondrite‐normalised REE diagrams suggest that values determined in this study are of greater accurac