An optimized and validated spectrophotometric method has been developed for the determination of cefixime in pharmaceutical formulations. The method is based on the complexation reaction between cefixime and palladium ion in the presence of acidic buffer solution (pH 3) in ethanol-distilled water medium at room temperature. The complex absorbed maximally at 352 nm. Beer's law is obeyed in the working concentration range of 2.5-35 μg/mL with apparent molar absorptivity of 1.015×10 L/mol cm and Sandell's sensitivity of 0.001 μg/cm/0.001 absorbance unit. The limits of detection and quantitation for the proposed method are 0.175 and 0.583 μg/mL, respectively. The effect of common excipients used as additives has been studied in the determination of cefixime. The proposed method has been successfully applied for the determination of cefixime in pharmaceutical formulations. The results obtained by the proposed method were statistically compared with the reference method using and values and found no significant difference between the two methods.