This volume contains the proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Rewriting Logic and its Applications (WRLA 2010) that was held in Paphos, Cyprus, March 20–21, 2010, as a satellite workshop of the European Joint C- ferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2010). Rewriting logic is a natural semantic framework for representing conc- rency,parallelism,communicationandinteraction,aswellasbeing anexpressive (meta)logical framework for representing logics. It can then be used for spe- fying a wide range of systems and programming languages in various appli- tion ?elds. In recent years, several executable speci?cation languages based on rewriting logic (ASF+SDF, CafeOBJ, ELAN, Maude) have been designed and implemented. The aim of the WRLA workshop series is to bring together - searchers with a common interest in rewriting logic and its applications, and to give them the opportunity to present their recent works, discuss future research directions, and exchange ideas. Previous WRLA workshops were held in Asilomar (1996), Pont-a-Mousson ` (1998), Kanazawa (2000), Pisa (2002), Barcelona (2004), Vienna (2006), and Budapest (2008), and their proceedings have been published inElectronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. In addition, selected papers from WRLA 1996 have been published in a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science,and selected papers from WRLA 2004 appeared in a special issue of Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation.