Background: Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is one of the microvascular complications of rndiabetes mellitus manifested as increased albumin in urine excretion. Total leucocyte count isrna crude, but a sensitive indicator of inflammation and studied in many non-communicablerndiseases such as acute myocardial infarction, stroke, heart failure and cancer as index ofrninflammation. In this study, the neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) was evaluated betweenrnT2DM patients with and without DN. rnObjective: To assess the neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio as an inflammatory marker among Typern2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients with and without diabetic nephropathy. rnMethodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted to compare NLR between type 2rndiabetic patients with and without DN at Bole 17 Health Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia fromrnOctober 15, 2019 to April14, 2020. Convenient sampling technique was used to recruit thernstudy participants. The data was entered in to Epi-data statistical software version 3.1 and thenrnexported to SPSS software version 22.0 for analysis. Simple descriptive statistics such asrnmean, standard deviation, and percentages were used to present socio-demographicrncharacteristics and magnitude of patients with DN, without DN and NLR ratio. Appropriaternstatistical tests, including student t-test, chi-square test, and Pearson correlation were done tornanalyze the statistical data. The p-values < 0.05 were considered statistically significant. rnResults: Out of the 199 DM patients, 22.6% and 77.4% were found with diabetic nephropathyrn(albumin positive) and without diabetic nephropathy (albumin negative), respectively.rnInterestingly, the mean NLR value (2.66Â±0.49) was found higher in diabetic patients with DNrncompared to the mean NLR (1.65Â±0.20) of diabetes patients without DN (p