Dysprosium iron garnets are of scientific importance because of the wide range of magnetic properties that can be obtained in substituting dysprosium by a rare earth metal. In the present work, the effect of Mn substitution on magnetostructural changes in dysprosium ferrite nanoparticles is studied. Highly crystalline pure and Mn doped dysprosium ferrite nanoparticles were synthesized by hydrothermal method. The samples were calcined at 1100 degrees C for 2h in air atmosphere which is followed by characterization using XRD, FT-IR analysis, SEM, XPS and VSM. The average crystallite size of synthesized samples were calculated by X-ray diffraction falls in the range of 88.4-86.8 nm and was found to be in cubic garnet structure. For further investigation of the structure and corresponding changes in the tetrahedral and octahedral stretching vibrational bonds, FT-IR was used. The synthesized samples consist of multiple oxidation (Fe3+ and Fe2+) states for Fe ions and (Mn3+ and Mn2+) Mn ions analyzed in three ways of Fe 2p and Mn 2p spectra from the XPS analysis. With respect to Mn dopant in Dy3Fe5O12, the cationic distributions of elements were discussed from high resolution XPS spectra by peak position and shift, area, width. To find out the porous/void surface morphology of the sample, scanning electron microscopy was used. From XPS analysis, the presence of elements (Dy, Mn, Fe and O) and their composition in the prepared samples were confirmed. Further, the role of dopant on the magnetic properties of the dysprosium ferrite nanoparticles was also observed from VSM which shows the ferromagnetic behavior. It was concluded that the magnetic properties of synthesized nanoparticles mainly depended on the oxidation state of elements, cationic distribution and crystallinity. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.