In this paper, we discovered that CuFe2O4 magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) possessed high catalytic performance in the reduction of nitrophenol for the first time. The as-prepared CuFe2O4 MNPs exhibited several advantages such as stability, monodispersity, low-cost, simplicity and rapid separation performance over other catalysts for the reduction of nitrophenol. The CuFe2O4 MNPs showed high efficiency in the catalytic reduction of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol with the conversion of 95% within 40s in the presence of NaBH4. The pseudo-first-order kinetic equation could describe the reduction of 4-nitrophenol with the excess amount of NaBH4. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.