Chemical oxygen demand (COD) is important for water quality assessment, representing the level of reductive organic pollution from eutrophication in aquatic systems. For surface water quality monitoring, permanganate is usually applied as oxidizing reagent, and the routine COD Mn determination is mostly achieved by titration method. However, this titration method is tedious and time consuming, and the results suffer from the environmental temperature fluctuation and operation technique. In this study, a novel COD Mn determination method was developed using gas-phase molecular absorption spectrometry equipped with online automated digestion device for the first time. The effect of digestion temperature, digestion time and sulfuric acid content was thoroughly studied. This method exhibited a good linearity (0.35 to 12 mg/L), low detection limit (0.12 mg/L), and good RSD from various water samples (0.71-2.37%). When used for COD Mn determination in routine water quality monitoring, this automated GPMAS can considerably improve analysis speed, efficiency, accuracy and stability compared to traditional titration method.