Abstract. We extend the theory of Rubio de Francia extrapolation, including offdiagonal, limited range and A ∞ extrapolation, to the weighted variable Lebesgue spaces L p(·) (w). As a consequence we are able to show that a number of different operators from harmonic analysis are bounded on these spaces. The proofs of our extrapolation results are developed in a way that outlines a general approach to proving extrapolation theorems on other Banach function spaces.