A preconcentration procedure for determination of palladium by laser thermal lens spectrometry (TLS) is proposed. It is based on cloud point extraction of palladium(II) ions as 2-(3,5-dichloro-2-pyridylazo)-5-dimethylaminoaniline (3,5-diCl-PADMA) complexes using octylphenoxypolyethoxyethanol (Triton X-114) as surfactant. The effects of various experimental conditions such as pH, concentration of ligand and surfactant, equilibration temperature and time on cloud point extraction were studied. Under the optimized conditions, the calibration graph was linear in the range of 0.15~6 ng mL<sup>−1</sup>, and the detection limit was 0.04 ng mL<sup>−1</sup> with an enrichment factor of 22. The sensitivity was enhanced by 846 times when compared with the conventional spectrophotometric method. The recovery of palladium was in the range of 96.6%~104.0%. The proposed method was applied to the determination of palladium in water samples.