Salfit (Arabic: سلفيت, romanized: Salfīt) is a city in the central West Bank, Palestine, and the capital of the Salfit Governorate. It is located adjacent to the Israeli settlement of Ariel. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), Salfit had a population of 10,911 in 2017. Since the 1995 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Salfit, located in Area A, has been administered by the Palestinian National Authority, while continuing under Israeli military occupation.

According to Edward Henry Palmer, the name was possibly from "levelled sown field".

Pottery sherds from the Iron Age I, Iron Age II, Persian, Hellenistic, and the Roman eras have been found, while no sherds from the Byzantine era have been found.

According to Ronnie Ellenblum, Salfit was re-established during early Muslim rule (7th–11th centuries) and continued to exist through the Crusader period. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Salfit was inhabited by Muslims. Pottery sherds from the Crusader, Ayyubid and Mamluk eras have also been found here.

Salfit was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with all of Palestine, and sherds from the early Ottoman era have been found. The village appeared in Ottoman tax registers under the name of Salfit al-Basal as being in the Nahiya ("Subdistrict") of Jabal Qubal, part of the Sanjak of Nablus in 1596. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 33.3% on various agricultural products, such as wheat, barley, summer crops, olives, goats and/or beehives, in addition to "occasional revenues"; a total of 7,618 akçe.

The city formed part of the highland region known as Jūrat ‘Amra or Bilād Jammā‘īn. Situated between Dayr Ghassāna in the south and the present Route 5 in the north, and between Majdal Yābā in the west and Jammā‘īn, Mardā and Kifl Ḥāris in the east, this area served, according to historian Roy Marom, "as a buffer zone between the political-economic-social units of the Jerusalem and the Nablus regions. On the political level, it suffered from instability due to the migration of the Bedouin tribes and the constant competition among local clans for the right to collect taxes on behalf of the Ottoman authorities."

It served as a hub for the local villages, and was one of many large commercial villages in the area that served a mediating role between the administrative center of Nablus and the smaller villages. It was noted as a Muslim village, Selfit, in Jurat Merda, south of Nablus in 1838. An Ottoman census conducted in 1870/1871 (1288 AH) listed the village in the nahiya (sub-district) of Jamma'in al-Thani, subordinate to Nablus. The city was described as "a large village, on high ground, with olive groves round it, and a pool to the east. It is apparently an ancient site with rock-cut tombs." by the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine in 1882. It further noted that there were two springs to the west of the village.

Towards the end of Ottoman rule, Salfit was one of the two largest villages in the District of Nablus that produced olive oil. At the time there were tensions between the residents of the village and the merchants of the administrative center of Nablus. The boys' school had about 100 pupils while the girls' school had 10 pupils. One of the reasons for the disparity was the locust attack on Salfit's crop earlier the previous year which had destroyed the village's harvest. Because of the consequent poverty and state of demise, parents kept their daughters at home to care for the family.