The mixing of rice and brown rice produced in different years is banned in Korea by the grain management act. However, there has been no reported method for discriminating the production year of rice. The objective of this study was to develop a method for discriminating the production year of rice and brown rice based on their phospholipids content. One hundred rice samples and 130 brown rice samples produced between 2012 and 2015 were collected. Twelve phosphatidylcholine components were analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Phosphatidylcholine was used as an internal standard to calculate the peak intensity of the samples. A statistical analysis of the results showed that the centroid distance between the stale and new rice was 4.16 and the classification ratio was 97%. To verify the calculated discriminant, 61 and 40 rice samples were collected. The accuracy of discrimination was 82% by primary verification and 80% by secondary verification. The statistical analysis of brown rice showed that the centroid distance between the stale and new brown rice was 3.14 and the classification ratio was 96%. To verify the calculated discriminant, 10 samples of new rice and 30 samples of stale rice were collected and the accuracy of discrimination was 93%. The accuracy of discrimination for rice stored at room temperature was 57.9 –92.1% and that for rice stored at a low temperature was 86.8–94.7%, depending on the storage period. For brown rice, the detection accuracy was 94.7–100% at room temperature and 92.1–100% at a low temperature, depending on the storage period. The accuracy of discrimination for rice was affected by the storage temperature and time, while that for brown rice was more than 92% regardless of the storage conditions. These results suggest that the developed discriminant analysis method could be utilized to determine the production year of rice and brown rice.