OBJECTIVES Based on the content of drugs in households, it is possible to examine the inclination of patients towards self-medication and groups of drugs that are commonly used for this purpose. Taking into consideration the above, the present study aimed to investigate the self-medication practice, with an emphasis on self-medication with prescription only medications. METHODS The study was performed in 8 months period and involved 383 randomly selected households.The study consisted of a personal insight into the inventory of all drugs. The interviewer recorded the total number of drugs in households and asked respondents for each the drug was obtained on prescription or bought in the pharmacy for self-medication. After the data were collected, drugs were classified according the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification System. Drugs were also classified according to ALIMS (Medicines and Medical Devices Agency of Serbia) into two groups: prescription only medication (POM) and OTC (Over the Counter) drugs and then analyzed. RESULTS The total number of drug items present in the 383 households was 4384 with an average of 11.4±5.8 per household. More than a half of drugs in households were prescription only medications (58,5%). Approximately one third of these drugs were obtained without prescription. The most common prescription only medications obtained without prescription were anti-inflammatory and antirheumatic products (41,8%)  and antibacterials for systemic use (12,4%). Ibuprofen (61,0%), diclofenac (27,8%) and nimesulide (8,2%) were the most common self-medicated drugs in the group of antiinflamatory drugs, while the most frequently self-medicated antibiotics were cefalexin (25,7%), doxyciclin (18,6%), cotrimoxazole (17,7 %). CONCLUSIONS In conclusion, our survey indicated that self-mediation with prescription drugs appeared to be a rather common practice, which is far away from the concept of "responsible self-medication", especially regarding antibiotics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technological development, Republic of Serbia, project No. 41012.