Under the new environmental regulations announced by the government, utilities will have to cut their sulfur dioxide emissions by 60% from 1991 levels by the year of 1999. Sulfur dioxide emissions can be reduced prior to combustion by physical, chemical or biological coal cleaning. The new technology of high gradient magnetic separation (HGMS) offers the potential of economic separatoins of a variety of fine, weakly magnetic minerals including inorganic sulfur and many ash-forming minerals from coals. In the present paper, magnetic separation tests have been conducted on Korean anthracite and high-sulfur Chinese coal to investigate the feasibility of these techniques for reducing sulfur content from coals. In wet magnetic separation, the studied operating parameters include particle size, pH, matrix types, feed solids content, feed rate, number of cleaning stages and etc. The results shows that for wet separation, 60~70% of total sulfur was removed from coals with over 80% combustible recovery, on the other hand, for dry separation, 47.6% of total sulfur was removed from coals with 75% recovery.