Subjective visual fatigue symptoms of visual display terminal (VDT) users and non-VDT users were analyzed to identify the relationships between these symptoms and develop an appropriate method for evaluating visual complaints resulting from VDT use. The data collected by means of a questionnaire at the beginning and the end of each of three workdays were used for the analysis. Principal component analysis was applied to the mean rating scores of severity for 19 symptoms at the beginning and the end of the workday for each of 10 groups of workers that differed in VDT use or non-use, age, VDT type and VDT operating hours per day. Two of the four factors extracted by the analysis had larger factor scores at the end than at the beginning of a workday, and were recognized as representing the effect related to the day's work. One of these two factors related to general symptoms frequently complained of as "accommodation-relating" symptoms: blear-eyed feeling , difficulty in focusing on distant objects, compressed feeling, etc. The other factor related to relatively infrequently mentioned "pain-like" symptoms: aching eyes, difficulty in gazing at moving objects, headache, difficulty in maintaning eye openness, etc. These latter "pain-like" symptoms had higher factor scores in the elderly user groups with prolonged VDT use. These results show that the "pain-like" visual symptoms are identified as the important subjective symptoms in evaluating visual load associated with intensive or prolonged VDT use.