Irrigation Agriculture plays an important role to maintain sustainable food security by improving agricultural production. Uneven distribution and rainfall shortage resulted in unsustainable food production leading to food insecurity in Ethiopia. The establishment of irrigation development strategies may have tremendous role to reduce the risk of uneven distribution of rainfall. This study aims to identify suitable lands for surface irrigation development in Andasa watershed Abay basin, Ethiopia based on GIS based multicriteria evaluation technique. Bio-physical factors (land use land cover, soil, slope, and river proximity), that significantly affect surface irrigation suitability were considered. Each of these was processed and analyzed for its potential contribution to surface irrigation suitability on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The factors were weighted using a pair-wise comparison matrix and weights were combined using the weighted overlay analysis. The analysis result indicated that 5.4, 44.4, 49.3, and 0.5% were highly, moderately, marginally, and not suitable for surface irrigation, respectively. Majority of the study area (50.2%) is suitable for surface irrigation. slope and River proximity were the major limiting factor and the cause for the majority of the study area was highly suitable to moderately suitable class. Similar studies in the future should consider soil chemical properties since this study didn’t consider soil chemical properties as a factor in the overlay analysis.