A simple, one-step, rapid method to detect bisphenol A (BPA) using a label-free aptasensor is presented. A high selective anti-BPA aptamer was added to gold nanoparticles (GNPs) to prepare the label-free aptasensor for BPA, which maintains good tolerance of GNPs under aqueous conditions with high salt concentrations. With the presence of BPA in the aptasensor system, the GNPs would aggregate by competitive binding of BPA and aptamer. Detection results can be visualized by the aggregation-induced color change of GNPs without the use of any instrumentation. The limit of visual detection (LOD) was found to be 0.1ng/mL by naked-eye observation, which was competitive to some current rapid BPA detection methods, even some instrumental based methods. Besides the obvious advantages, including reduced detection time and operation procedures, the results of this method meet the various detection requirements for BPA and are comparable to the traditional ELISA and instrument-based methods. The proposed one-step, label-free method was successfully used to determine BPA in actual water samples. Crown Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.