Cu doped ZnO was prepared using the sol-gel method. Different techniques have been used to examine the effect of copper impurities on the physical characteristics of p-type ZnO. All the films are found to crystalize in the wurtzite structure and at 9 wt% of Cu, the preferential orientation was found to be along the (002) direction. The increase of Cu content leads to a morphological structure characterized by wrinkles. The surface roughness has been measured by AFM and varied between 31 and 50 nm. The UV–Visible analysis shows that the films are transparent in the visible range and the band gap was found to reduce until 3.03 eV with the highest transmittance was found in 9 wt% Cu. Hall-effect measurements indicate that all doped samples are p-type semiconductors. Vibrating sample magnetometer shows that all films exhibit room ferromagnetism with different behavior, a high amount of O vacancies leads to a reduced magnetism. It is therefore preferable to eliminate oxygen vacancies in order to favour high ferromagnetism p-type ZnO.