Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) gained a special place in the goals of education in Indonesia. It is due to its importance and relevance to the twenty first century needs and challenges. Referring to Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, HOTS includes the cognitive dimension of analyzing, evaluating, and creating. In fact, the results of international assessments such as TIMMS and PISA of Indonesian students are in the lower rank. It indicates that Indonesian students have not been used to working on higher-level thinking problems. This study aims to analyze students’ difficulties in solving HOTS problems in mathematics subject. This is a descriptive study using a qualitative approach. The subjects of this study consisted of 20 elementary school students of Grade V. The data were collected using achievement test measuring HOTS in mathematics subject, which was developed based on the standard competencies of elementary school mathematics in curriculum 2013. Then, the data were analyzed descriptively by observing students’ errors in solving HOTS test items, and by classifying the errors based on Newman’s Error Procedure (NEP) which consist of difficulties in comprehension, transformation, process skills, and encoding.