Rheumatoid arthritis is one of the important rheumatological diseases, which causes deformities and functional disability in many peoples. The aim of our work is to determine pain characteristics in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and see if rheumatoid arthritis patients can use visual analogue scales to distinguish and grade the severity of pain at different times and to correlate pain intensity as measured by VAS to different parameters of disease severity and activity. Thirty patients with a definite diagnosis of RA according to the American Rheumatism Association criteria for the classification of rheumatoid arthritis and a functional capacity of grade II comprised the material of this study. Patients were subjected to full clinical assessment, laboratory investigation (CBC, ESR, CRP and RF) and pain assessment regarding diurnal variation characteristics and severity using VAS. This study showed that objective measures for determination of disease activity in Egyptian RA patients may be still more trustable than subjective measures, the reliability and validity of VAS may be doubtful and the word ache is the word used by most of the Egyptian RA patients to describe their pain character.