Experiments were carried out to determine the breakthrough of bacteria through a saturated aquifer sand at three flow velocities and three cell concentrations. Bacteria were either suspended in deionized water or 0.01 mol L⁻¹ NaCl solution. Bacterial transport was found to increase with flow velocity and cell concentration but was significantly retarded in the presence of 0.01 mol L⁻¹ NaCl. A mathematical model based on the advection‐dispersion equation was formulated to describe bacterial transport and retention in porous media. The transport equations for bacteria were solved using the finite difference Crank‐Nicolson scheme combined with Newton‐Raphson iterations. The best fit of the numerical model to the experimental data was obtained using the downhill simplex optimization technique to minimize the sum of the squares of deviations between model predictions and experimental data by varying three parameters. This numerical model was found to describe the experimental data very well under all the experimental conditions tested. An alternative model (also based on the advection‐dispersion equation) was tested against all the experimental data sets, but it did not represent the experimental data as well as the model proposed in this paper.