A study on occupational stress of rural and urban police was carried out in the year 2014-15 in Dharwad taluk with the objectives to assess the occupational stress of rural and urban police and to know the relation between demographic variables with occupational stress of police. A total of 120 police were randomly selected from 22 police stations of Dharwad taluk. The occupational stress was assessed using occupational stress scale developed by Srivastav and Sing (1984), socio economic status was assessed using Socio-economic status scale developed by Agarwal et al. (2005) and self structured questionnaire were used to collect information. The data was collected through questionnaire method along with personal interview of the respondents. The results revealed that 58.33 per cent of police had moderate level of occupational stress followed by high and low level. Occupational stress had significant and positive relationship with duty period, distance travelled between residence and work place, pointing out that higher the duty period and distance between residence and work place higher the stress level. There was significant and negative relationship between family size and occupational stress indicating that higher the family size lower the stress. Interestingly no significant relationship between age, education, marital status, work experience, work satisfaction, socio economic status and occupational stress