The aim of the present work is to provide information about the migration of phthalate and non-phthalate plasticizers generally used in flexible polyvinyl chloride (PVC) applications. Plastisols (pastes) were prepared by mixing PVC, plasticizer, and thermal stabilizer. The plasticized PVC (p-PVC) films are obtained by gelation at 160 degrees C for 15 min. The p-PVC films were heat treated at 50, 85, 100, 130, and 160 degrees C up to 420 min to follow the mass loss to find out diffusivity of plasticizer out of films into air and to determine related activation energies. The films having di-octyl terephthalate (DOTP) and di-isononyl 1,2-cyclohexanedicarboxylic acid (DINCH) exhibited the lowest mass loss in general, among the phthalate and non-phthalate plasticizer having p-PVC films, respectively, as confirmed by FTIR investigation. The same tendency was observed for diffusion coefficients and for the activation energies of migration. The diffusion coefficients were found to be around 3.5 x 10182.1 x 1017 m2/sec for the studied plasticizers in PVC at 50 degrees C and around 4.0 x 10159.9 x 1014 m2/sec at 160 degrees C. The activation energies for 85160 degrees C interval were determined to be between 70 and 153 kJ/mol (0.721.58 eV) for the plasticizers used herein those could be treated as a homologous series as deduced from the related compensation factors. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013