Dissolutive spreading over a porous surface is a phenomenon involving spreading, penetration, as well as dissolution. Droplet spreading forms the basis of numerous industrial operations including the spray coating of urea fertilizer to produce slow release urea. The slow release characteristics of urea highly depend on the coating uniformity that can be achieved by sound knowledge of droplet spreading behaviour over the urea surface. Since numerous waterborne coating materials are being studied presently, dissolutive wetting of the urea surface has been investigated in the current work. Response surface methodology has been utilized to study the interactive effects of process parameters on the dissolutive wetting of an aqueous glycerin solution on a porous urea surface. The effect of impact velocity, surface porosity, and urea solubility has been investigated on three response objectives namely contact angle, spreading factor, and normalized residual drop volume. The results have been compared with an earlier work performed under similar conditions for non-dissolutive wetting. The comparison reveals that dissolutive wetting shows lesser optimum contact angle (81 ) and greater optimum spreading factor (21 ) as compared to non-dissolutive wetting. © 2018 Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering