27 904 ESTs of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) were downloaded from the database of NCBI and some redundant or low quality sequences were removed. Finally, 11 224 non-redundant ESTs with total length of 6 198 092 bp were obtained. SSRIT (Simple sequence repeat identification tool), a web tool for SSR hunting, was used to analyze the sequences. The results showed that a total of 982 SSRs distributed in 865 ESTs were detected, with the frequency for the non-redundant ESTs being 8.69%. The average length and distribution distance of the EST-SSRs were about 15.58 bp and 6.31 kb. Among the different SSRs ranging from 2 to 7 bp, dinucleotide repeats were most abundant (66.90%), followed by trinucleotide repeats (30.75%). Among 83 identified motif types, TA/AT had the highest EST frequency (24.95%). The results would contribute to the development of EST-SSR markers in chickpea.