Cleaning validation activities are performed to ensure the pharmaceutical production equipment is consistently cleaned to an acceptable level before the next product is manufactured, ensuring product integrity and quality.One of the primary methods of cleaning verification is swabbing of the equipment surface to remove any residue followed by further extraction from the swab into solution for testing by traditional anal. techniques (such as HPLC, GC and UV) or non specific tests such as Total Organic Carbon (TOC).This conventional approach can present difficulties when the anal. methods are not capable.This can occur due to inappropriate limits of detection, chem. inertness or poor solubilities of the residue in acceptable swabbing solvents and poor residue extraction from the swab into solution prior to anal.NIR anal. of the residue direct on the swab was identified as a possible approach for cleaning measurements due to the well established sensitivity of NIR to organic mols.NIR has been overlooked as a tool for cleaning validation despite being widely used in the Pharmaceutical industry for applications such as identification of raw materials and quant. active assay of finished dosage forms.A rapid NIR method was developed for cleaning validation anal. of inert mineral oils at residue levels.Following conventional swabbing with an alc. solvent, the swab was allowed to evaporate to dryness and scanned by a reflectance NIR spectrometer.The method was found to be specific, repeatable and reproducible, with an appropriate limit of detection and sensitivity to establish suitable acceptance limits for linearity data to surpass a limit (Pass/Fail) test and develop a semi-quant. method.The anal. is non-destructive and rapid, requiring no secondary residue extraction, allowing rapid (60% quicker turnaround) feedback of the status of the cleaning and can easily be used by plant operators with no chem. background.