Introduction: To provide quality palliative care, nurses must have good knowledge and attitudernabout palliative care. Different Studies have documented that nurses and other health carernprofessionals are inadequately prepared to care for patients in palliative care. In the case ofrnnurses several reasons have been identified including inadequacies in nursing education and lackrnof in-service training related to palliative care.rnObjective: To assess knowledge and attitude towards palliative care among nurses working inrnAddis Ababa government hospitals, Ethiopia, 2016.rnMethods: An institution based cross-sectional study was conducted among 392 nurses in fourrnrandomly selected government hospitals in Addis Ababa. To select the study participants, therntotal sample size was allocated proportionally based on the number of nurses from each selectedrnhospitals. Again proportional allocation was done for each work area in each selected hospitals.rnFinally from each work areas, nurses were selected by using a systematic random samplingrnmethod to attain the final individuals. The knowledge and attitude of nurses towards palliativerncare was measured using questionnaires which are adopted and modified from the Palliative CarernQuiz for Nursing and Frommelt Attitude toward Care of the Dying scale respectively. Epidatarnand SPSS version 23 software were applied for data entry and analysis respectively.rnResults: the response rate was 392 (92.02%) of total 426 participants. Study results have shownrnthat only 104(26.5%) of the respondents had good knowledge and 331(84.4%) had favorablernattitude towards palliative care. Level of Education, working department, years of workingrnexperiences in nursing, experience in caring chronically ill patient and in-service training ofrnpalliative care had significant association with the knowledge of nurses. Level of education,rnexperience in caring chronically ill patient and in-service training were found to be statisticallyrnsignificant with the attitude of nurses towards palliative care.rnConclusion and recommendations: The nurses had poor knowledge but their attitude towardsrnpalliative care was favorable. Attention should be given towards palliative care by the healthrnpolicy and needs to be incorporated in the national curriculum of nurse education.rnKeywords: knowledge, attitude, palliative care, nurses, Addis Ababa, government hospitals.