A direct procedure for the determination of total soil carbohydrate content and a classic determination after acid hydrolysis, both employing the phenol-sulphuric acid method, are compared. The direct procedure enables simultaneous determination of mono-, oligo- and polysaccharides without prior hydrolysis. This procedure is reproducible and takes only a short period of time. The correlation between the proposed method and the classic one with hydrolysis was high (r2 = 0.9843; n = 11; p = 0.05).