Various abiotic stresses such as high salinity and drought affect various aspects of plant physiology and metabolism and as a result, severely diminish crop productivity in some area. In chickpea, three genomes including both ICC4985 (desi type) and CDC frontier (kabuli type) from Cicer arietinum as well as the wild species PI489777 ( Cicer reticulatum ) have been sequenced, which provided a basis to further explore the mechanism on abiotic stress tolerance. In this study, we genome-widely identified 6 abiotic stress related gene families in these three chickpea genotypes and compared these families with those from other plants. These 6 gene families include high-affinity K + transporter (HKT), K + uptake permease (KUP), cation proton antiporters (CPA), vacuolar H(+)-translocating inorganic pyrophosphatase (VHP), dehydrin (DHN) and stress responsive protein (SRP) families. Our data showed that three chickpea and other plant genomes encoded different sizes of family members and exhibited obvious difference in the family expansion and evolutionary selection. Both segmental and tandem duplication significantly contributed to the CPA family expansion. Although the CPA family showed the strong purifying selection within a species, positive selection was detected among different species of chickpea. Expression analysis showed that most of these family members were expressed in multiple tissues and no tissue-preferred genes were detected. Furthermore, up to 17.9-100% of these family members were up- or down-regulated by either high salinity or drought stress, suggesting their important roles in abiotic stress signaling pathways.