Eighty-nine soil samples were collected from the Binzhou oil mining area of the Yellow River Delta (including 83 farmland soil samples and 6 soil samples from an oil extraction area). A total of 16 US-EPA priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were measured by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Principal component analysis (PCA) and positive matrix factorization (PMF) were employed to investigate potential source apportionment of PAHs in the farmland soil. The total PAH concentrations ranged from 31.5 μg·kg-1 to 1399.4 μg·kg-1 (dry weight) with an arithmetic mean concentration of 119.4 μg·kg-1. The characteristics of PAHs showed that 4- to 6-ring PAHs were slightly dominant in this study area, and most of the PAHs were significantly correlated (P<0.01), which indicates that the sources of the PAHs had some similarities in this sampling area. Source apportionment results derived from two different models were similar, indicating that the sources of PAHs were coal combustion, biomass combustion, fossil fuel combustion, and diesel combustion. The results of the PMF were more detailed, with the following four factors being identified:gasoline combustion (24.05%), diesel combustion (6.17%), low-temperature pyrolysis processes (60.67%), and coal combustion (9.11%).