We present the detection of hydrogen sulfide (HS) in a quantum cascade laser (QCL) based gas sensing system employing direct laser absorption spectroscopy.The sensitivity is obtained to be 3.61 × 10 cm Hz and the HS broadening coefficient in N is analyzed by fitting to the plot of the Lorentzian half width at the half maximum as a function of N pressure is 0.1124±0.0031 cm.atm.A simulation based on data from the HITRAN database shows broad agreement with the experimentally obtained spectrum.