Cation exchange capacity (CEC) of the soil is a measure of the soil ability to hold positively charged ions and is an important indicator of soil physicochemical characteristic. It is an important property for site specific management of soil nutrients in precision agriculture. The conventional analytical methods used for the determination of CEC are expensive, difficult and time consuming, because different cations must be extracted and determined. Visible and near infrared (vis-NIR) spectroscopy holds large potential for the measurement of physico-chemical properties of different natural resources including soils. This study was conducted to investigate the potential of the vis-NIR spectroscopy for the measurement of the CEC of soil samples collected from one field in Turkey of vertisol, using a fibre-type vis-NIR spectrophotometer (AgroSpec, tec5 Technology for Spectroscopy, Germany) with a spectral range of 350 - 2200 nm. The diffuse reflectance spectra of 92 fresh soil samples were measured. Partial least squares (PLS) regression analyses with full cros-validation were performed to establish models for CEC. Before PLS analyses, the entire spectra were randomly split three different calibration (74 samples - 80%) and three validation (18 samples - 20%) sets. Results showed that the prediction performance of CEC in cross-validation was successful with an average R² is 0.83, the prediction performance in the validation set was also successful, with an average R² is 0.90, average root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 2.76% and average residual prediction deviations (RPDs) of 3.08. The excellent results confirmed that the vis-NIR spectroscopy can be successfully used for the prediction of CEC under laboratory measurement conditions. Further work is being carried out to evaluate the accuracy of measurement conditions, which will assist within field management of soil fertility.