A high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with diode array detector (DAD) and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) was established for the simultaneous determination of chlorogenic acid (1), sweroside (2), luteolin-7-O-glucoside (3), (E)-aldosecologanin (4) and 3,5-dicaffeoylquinic acid (5) from Lonicera joponica flower buds. The optimal chromatographic conditions were obtained on an ODS column (5 ${mu}m$, 4.6${ imes}$150 mm) with the column temperature $25^{circ}C$. The mobile phase was composed of (A) water with 0.1% formic acid and (B) acetonitrile with 0.1% formic acid using a gradient elution, the flow rate was 0.3 ml/min. Detection wavelength was set at 250 nm. All calibration curves showed good linear regression ($r^2$>0.994) within test ranges. The developed method provided satisfactory precision and accuracy with overall intra-day and inter-day variations of 0.05${sim}$1.95% and 0.15${sim}$2.26%, respectively, and the overall recoveries of 97.71${sim}$103.65% for the five compounds analyzed. The verified method was successfully applied to quantitative determination of the three types (phenolic compounds, iridoids and flavonoids) of bioactive compounds in 21 commercial L. japonica flower buds samples from different markets in Korea and China. The analytical results demonstrated that the contents of the five analytes vary significantly with sources.