Ultrafast pump-probe transient reflectance (TR) spectroscopy was used to study carrier dynamics in an epitaxial perovskite oxide thin film of LaFeO 3 (LFO) with a thickness of 40 unit cells (16 nm) grown by molecular beam epitaxy on (LaAlO 3) 0.3 (Sr 2 AlTaO 6) 0.7 (LSAT). TR spectroscopy shows two negative transients in reflectance with local maxima at $2.5 eV and $3.5 eV which correspond to two optical transitions in LFO as determined by ellipsometry. The kinetics at these transients were best fit with an exponential decay model with fast (5–40 ps), medium ($200 ps), and slow ($ 3 ns) components that we attribute mainly to recombination of photoexcited carriers. Moreover, these reflectance transients did not completely decay within the observable time window, indicating that $10% of photoexcited carriers exist for at least 3 ns. This work illustrates that TR spectroscopy can be performed on thin (<20 nm) epitaxial oxide films to provide a quantitative understanding of recombination lifetimes, which are important parameters for the potential utilization of perovskite films in photovoltaic and photocatalytic applications. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4890241] Perovskite oxides are a class of transition metal oxides with the chemical structure ABO 3 . They have garnered much interest because of the diverse range of their physical and magnetic properties, including ferroelectricity, insulator-to-metal transitions, ferromagnetism, and superconductivity. 1 Many perovskite oxides exhibit band gaps in the visible range, leading to growing research interest in utilizing perov-skite oxides for photovoltaic (PV) and photocatalytic (PC) applications. 2–9 However, understanding of the underlying ultrafast carrier dynamics in these materials is limited to a few studies, 10–12 despite the critical role that carrier lifetimes play in the design of materials for PV and PC applications. 13