Recently, nickel oxide, NiO, promoted with various dopants showed an interesting activity behavior inN2O direct decomposition. In this paper, the activity of a series of rare earth (Nd, Pr, Tb and Y) doped NiOcatalysts was investigated for this reaction. These catalysts have been prepared by the calcination of theircorresponding oxalate mixtures, which have been synthesized via the microwave-assisted precipitationroute using oxalic acid as precipitant. Characterization of the obtained catalysts was carried out by usingvarious physico-chemical techniques including TGA, FT-IR, XRD, FE-SEM, TEM, TPR, XPS and electricalconductivity. The results obtained revealed the nanocrystalline nature of the prepared catalysts. More-over, the presence of the various dopants has led to a noticeable decrease of the NiO crystallites size,mesoporosity development and an increase of its surface area and pore volume. There is a substantialactivity increase upon doping NiO with the various rare earth oxides. Such activity increase is associatedwith the structural modifications as well as the electrical conductivity increase of these catalysts.