Objective:The study's goal has been to identify depressive symptoms in elderly people living in communities or groups in the municipality of Petrolina, Pernambuco State, Brazil, through the Geriatric Depression Scale. Methods: It is a cross-sectional study that was carried out with 185 elderly people. Three structured and semistructured instruments were applied, including the Geriatric Depression Scale. Descriptive statistics and the logit model with Odds Ratio (OR) were used. The Kruskal Wallis and Mann Whitney tests were applied in order to evaluate the scale score. A significance level of 5% and a confidence interval of 95% were used. Results: The active elderly showed 36.2% of depressive symptoms. The multivariate model presented the gender (for men OR=0.31; p-value=0.043) and the health perception (OR=10.27 and p-value=0.001) as depression associated factors. Conclusion: There is a need for implementing strategies aiming to prevent depressive symptoms in elderly people, and also taking into consideration the factors associated with its occurrence.