The spools in most hydraulic spool type control valve have several circumferential grooves to pre-vent well known hydraulic locking problems which result in high friction force and excessive wear. In this paper, a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, FLUENT is used to investigate the flow and lubrication characteristics of grooved hydraulic spool valve. The stream lines and pressure distributions are obtained for various groove cross sectional shapes and film thicknesses. The stream lines are highly affected by groove cross sectional shape but pressure distributions mainly depend on the film shape and its magnitude. Therefore the numerical method adopted in this paper and results can be use in designing of various grooved spool valve.