Studies correlating genetic variation to gene expression facilitate the interpretation of common human phenotypes and disease. As functional variants may be operating in a tissue-dependent manner, we performed gene expression profiling and association with genetic variants (SNPs) on three cell types of 75 individuals. We detected cell type-specific genetic effects, with 69 - 80% of regulatory variants operating in a cell type-specific manner and identified multiple eQTLs per gene, unique or shared among cell types and positively correlated with the number of transcripts per gene. Cell type specific eQTLs were found at larger distances from genes and lower effect size similar to known enhancers. These data suggest that the complete regulatory variant repertoire can only be uncovered in the context of cell type specificity.