An Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is a low-cost, high-speed solution to the bottleneck problem of a broadband access network. This paper analyzes the delay and the jitter performance of dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) schemes for differentiated services in EPONs. Especially, the average packet delay and the delay jitter of the expedited forwarding (EF) traffic class are compared, with consideration as to whether a cyclic or an interleaved polling scheme is superior. This performance evaluation reveals that the cyclic polling based DBA scheme provides constant and predictable average packet delay and improved jitter performance for the EF traffic class without the influence of load variations.