Sands are highly prone to nutrient leaching due to low reactive surface area that is needed to retain water and nutrients. Recurrent or heavy rainfall events have the potential to leach mobile nutrients, especially N, which can limit crop nutrition and may risk contaminating ground water supplies. The main objective of this study was to assess the effect of compost, zeolite, spongolite and a water-absorbing polymer as amendments of water retention and nutrient leaching in an agricultural deep sand. The effects of amendment forms: compost in pellet or ground forms and zeolite in rock or milled forms was also investigated. An experiment using successive leaching events in columns was used to assess these treatments under controlled laboratory conditions. The addition of 20 t/ha of either ground compost or zeolite both in rock and milled forms increased water retention in sandy soils under low irrigation rate. In the unamended sand, 80 % of N was readily leached after the first two leaching events. The addition of zeolite and compost amendments had positive impacts on N retention. In the initial irrigation cycles, milled zeolite was more effective than zeolite rock in retaining ammonium-N, but it was reversed for nitrate-N retention. Application of 20 t of zeolite/ha also retained significantly more P and K when compared to the unamended sands, with milled zeolite more effective in preventing P and K leaching than zeolite rock. The leaching of K, Ca, Mg, S, Fe, and Na were significantly higher in compost amendments due to their inherently high concentrations in the amendment. Ground compost leached more nutrients than compost pellets. In general, spongolite and polymer amendments did not improve soil water and nutrient retention when compared to zeolite amendments. Zeolite was the most promising amendment for water and nutrient retention in the sand.