The Earth’s surface is undergoing significant land use, and land cover (LULC) changes because of numerous socioeconomic activities and natural events. The study was carried out in Sylhet Sadar to examine land use and land cover changes from 1990 through 2020. To assess land use pattern, multi-temporal satellite imageries (Landsat 7 for the years 1990, 2000 and 2010) (Landsat 8 for the year of 2020) were obtained from USGS GLOVIS. Based on the prior knowledge and a reconnaissance survey, the study area was classified into four major LULC cl water bodies, urban area, vegetation, and agricultural land. Supervised classification-maximum likelihood algorithm and stratified random sampling were applied to detect the extent as well as the percentage of each LULC class and classification accuracy assessment, respectively. The overall accuracies for the classified images of 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 were 88.5 %, 90 %, 90.5 %, and 92.5 %, respectively. Three change detection analyses (1990-2000, 2000-2010 and 2010-2010) were done to detect the shifting process of different land use/land cover classes. The results of this study revealed both an increase and decrease in the different LULC classes over 30 years. The results showed rapid growth of urban area (127.52 km?) between 1990 and 2020, while the same periods witnessed a reduction of agricultural land (-57.82 km’) and vegetation (-84.08 km?).