If your featureclasses are in Feature Datasets, then [@Aragon's solution][1] will not work because you need to walk through the feature datasets and then check the featureclasses. Using [@Aragon's code][1] as well as @gotchula's code from [List all feature classes in GDB, including within feature datasets][2], I produced the following code that will read through all feature datasets and feature classes in a geodatabase. **NOTE**: By default ListFields appears to be case-sensitive. I have added code to convert both the user-defined fieldname and the ListField name to lowercase for case-insensitive searches. You probably would also want to disable most of the print statements, but I left them in there so you can follow the code as it is running. I also created the sub-function FindField within the so that I could call it multiple times in the script without having to re-code it. import arcpy def FindField(fc,myField): fieldList = arcpy.ListFields(fc) for field in fieldList: if str.lower(str(field.name)) == str.lower(myField): print " " + fc + " contains fieldname: " + myField myField = "test" arcpy.env.workspace = "D:/test/data.gdb" #Search root level featureclasses for fc in arcpy.ListFeatureClasses(): print "Searching root level Featureclasses..." print " Searching " + fc FindField(fc,myField) #Search Feature Datasets for fds in arcpy.ListDatasets('','feature'): print "Searching FeatureDataset: " + fds for fc in arcpy.ListFeatureClasses('','',fds): print " Searching Featureclass... " + fc FindField(fc,myField) [1]: https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/26898/115 [2]: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/5893/list-all-feature-classes-in-gdb-including-within-feature-datasets