Recently, environmental scientists have been focused their attention on the occurrence of emerging contaminants in water, such as disinfection by products (DBPs), including chlorophenols. These pollutants can be a public health problem due to their carcinogenic properties. In this work, ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) coupled to a photodiode array detector (PDA) was used for the development of an analytical method capable of simultaneous identification and quantification of two chlorophenols namely, 2-chlorophenol and 2,4-dichlorophenol in water samples. In addition, a solid phase extraction (SPE) procedure for the extraction of these compounds was optimized. The chlorophenols were separated by an Acquity BEH C18 (100×2.1mm, 1.7μm) column with a mobile phase of acetonitrile/ultrapure water/formic acid (55/45/0.1, v/v/v). The flow rate of the mobile phase was 0.4mLmin−1. The optimized SPE–UHPLC/PDA technique was evaluated in terms of robustness, considering the enrichment factor for all of the studied chlorophenols. Linear calibration was obtained with correlation coefficients r2⩾0.998. Intra-day and inter-day precision was less than 5% and accuracy ranged from 99.95% to 103.32%, respectively. The obtained extraction recoveries were higher than 98%. The pre-concentration factor was 2.500 for the both analytes. Under optimized conditions, the detection limits of the overall SPE–UHPLC/PDA method were in the ngL−1 level. The excellent performance of the developed method, as well as the short analysis time makes it a promising analytical tool for the screening of chlorophenols in environmental water samples.