A method for the determination of urea residue in canned foods by high performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection (HPLC-FLD) coupled with precolumn derivatization was established. The sample (5.0 g), including canned edible fungi, fruit, vegetable, fish, and meat was extracted with 20 mL 1% (v/v) acetic acid solution. The extract was centrifuged, filtrated, and then derivatized with xanthydrol. The analysis was completed with HPLC-FLD. A good linear relationship was obtained in the range of 0.1-500 mg/L with the correlation coefficients more than 0.9995. The average recoveries of urea spiked at 0.001-30 g/kg levels in five kinds of canned foods ranged from 80.2% to 109.7% with the RSDs of 2.05%-6.53%. The limit of detection (LOD) was 0.5 mg/kg, and the limit of quantitation (LOQ) was 1.0 mg/kg. The proposed procedure was then applied to the analysis of 168 real samples collected from Xiamen, Fujian Province, China. The existence of urea was found in three pork cans with contents of 10.6, 62.1 and 2.6 mg/kg, respectively. The method is stable, reliable, simple and suitable for the determination of urea in canned foods, and has great potential for routine analysis in foodstuffs.