Sex hormones play an important role in adipose tissue metabolism by activating specific receptors that alter several steps of the lipolytic and lipogenic signal cascade in a depot and gender dependent manner. However, studies focusing on steroid receptor status in adipose tissue are scarce. In the present study, we analyzed steroid content (testosterone, 17-estradiol and progesterone) and its steroid receptor mRNA levels in different rat adipose tissue depots. As expected, testosterone levels were higher in males compared to females (p=0.031), while the reverse trend was observed for progesterone (p<0.001). It is noteworthy that estradiol adipose tissue levels were higher in inguinal than the rest of adipose tissues for both genders, where no sex differences in 17-E₂ tissue levels were noted (p=0,010 respect retroperitoneal, p=0.005 respect gonadal and p=0.018 respect mesenteric). Regarding steroid receptor levels, both AR, ER and ER receptor densities were more clearly dependent on adipose depot location rather than gender, with visceral depots showing an overall higher mRNA densities than their subcutaneous counterparts. Besides, expression of ER predominated over ER expression, and progesterone receptor (PR-B form and PR-A+B form) mRNAs were identically expressed regardless of the anatomic depot and the gender. In vitro studies in 3T3-L1 cells showed that estradiol increased ER (p=0.001) and AR expression (p=0.001), indicating that estrogen can alter both estrogenic and androgenic signalling in adipose tissue. The results highlighted in this study demonstrate important depot dependent differences in the sensitivity of adipose tissues to sex hormones between visceral and subcutaneous depots that could be related to metabolic situations observed in response to sex hormones.