Spent catalysts contain metals that have a high added value. From all metals, lanthanum has attracted a lot of attention due to the growing demand in the high-tech. The spent catalyst of the hydrotreatment unit is a material composed of lanthanum-enriched matrix of amorphous aluminosilicates. The experiment was carried out with a spent catalyst with a constant particle size of 90 μm. The treatments were obtained applying of two level factorial design to investigate the effect of following factors: temperature (20 - 60 °C), nitric acid concentration (3 - 6 M), leaching time (1 - 4 h) and percent solids (10 - 20 %). The research is carried out in two steps process: pretreatment of the catalyst and leaching with nitric acid. The leaching results show a yield of lanthanum of 99.44% using the following conditions: temperature (20 °C), nitric acid concentration (3M), leaching time (1 h), percent solids (20%) and 300 rpm. The principal analysis of the spent catalyst was carried out using the X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) technique, 3.08%, while the percentage of lanthanum recovery in the extract, washing and refining was carried out using the Inductive Coupling Plasma (ICP) technique.