Approximations of classifications, introduced and studied by Grzymala Busse [4], and approximations of sets are two different issues (Pawlak [9]) and the equivalence classes of approximate classifications can not be arbitrary sets. Busse [4] had established properties of approximations of classifications which were recently extended to necessary and sufficient type theorems by Tripathy et al. [12]. Recently, basic rough sets have been extended to introduce covering based rough sets. In this paper we introduce the notion of covering based approximations of classifications and study their properties. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.