A method for the determination of a focused laser beam waist via photoionization and retarding potential analysis is discussed. The focused laser beam was employed to photoionize gas phase clusters generated from a supersonic cluster source. It intersects the cluster beam at right angle in the first stage of the time‐of‐flight (TOF) acceleration lens assembly. With a simple modification on a laser‐based TOF mass spectrometer, retarding fields were applied right in front of the microchannel plate ion detector to map out the kinetic energy distribution of the cluster ions. The size of the laser beam along the molecular beam axis in the ionization region can then be directly related to this energy distribution. In addition, this method manifests a sensitive probe (within 10 &mgr;m) to the laser beam position.