Kotli District is a district of Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir in the Azad Kashmir region. It is one of the 10 districts of Pakistan's dependent territory of Azad Kashmir. It is bounded on the north by the Sudhanoti District and the Poonch District, on the north-east by the Poonch District of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, on the south by the Mirpur and Bhimber districts, and on the west by the Rawalpindi District on Pakistan's Punjab Province. Kotli is the biggest district of Azad Kashmir by population and the second biggest by land area, after the Neelum District. The district headquarters is the city of Kotli. The main native languages are Pahari, and Gujari.

Azad Jammu and Kashmir abbreviated as AJK and colloquially referred to as simply Azad Kashmir, is a region administered by Pakistan as a nominally self-governing entity and constituting the western portion of the larger Kashmir region, which has been the subject of a dispute between India and Pakistan since 1947. Azad Kashmir also shares borders with the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the south and west, respectively. On its eastern side, Azad Kashmir is separated from the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir by the Line of Control (LoC), which serves as the de facto border between the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir. Geographically, it covers a total area of 13,297 km2 (5,134 sq mi) and has a total population of 4,045,366 as per the 2017 national census.