Abstract: To investigate the variations in quality trend of cigarette cut fillers, HS-GC/MS was used to determine the contents of 50 volatile characteristic components in cut fillers of cigarettes of different batches and brands. By combining PCA-MD(Principal component analysis-Mahalanobis distance)statistical methods, the determined data were processed to analyze the variation trend of quality of cut filler. The results showed that:1)The cut fillers of cigarettes of five batches of brand C could be classified into five groups, the contents of characteristic components differed greatly between the samples produced in 2015 and 2016. From July to October in 2016, the contents of 50 volatile characteristic components in the cut fillers were basically consistent except that there was slight fluctuation in August, which could be attributed to the tobacco blend adjustment. 2)For the samples produced in 2015, there were great differences in the contents of characteristic components in the cut fillers of brands C and D, which indicated that PCA could be used to qualitatively describe the quality characteristics of the different brands. 3)The MD of cut fillers differed greatly between brands C and D, and the MD of cut filler of brand D was 5 to 10 times as that of brand C, which indicated that MD could be used to quantitatively characterize the quality variation of the cut filler. The research results could be applied to the quality consistency evaluation of the final cigarettes.