Various types of hydraulic shock absorbers are widely used in many fields because of its numerous advantages. However, in order to design adequate damping characteristics, accurate flow data near the orifices are required essentially. In this paper, a commercial computational fluid dynamics(CFD) code, FLUENT is adopted to investigate the flow characteristics near orifices of a shock absorber. Static pressure and velocity vector distributions, fluid path lines are presented for compression/tension strokes and various piston speeds. In order to validate the result of analysis, the numerically obtained damping forces are compared with those of analytical estimations obtained by modified Bernoulli equation. The results reported herein will provide better understanding of the detailed flow fields within shock absorber, and the CFD analysis method proposed in this paper can be used in the design of other types of hydraulic shock absorber.