Low salinity waterflooding (LSWF) is a proven enhanced oil recovery technique which has emerged in the last few decades due to its ability to recover more oil at the lowest cost possible. The technique has gained popularity as enormous laboratory experiments, simulation studies and field executions have shown positive results. In LSWF, the salinity of the injection water is significantly less compared to that of formation water, which is used in conventional waterflooding. The increasing number of matured oil fields globally encouraged the effectiveness of LSWF to increase the overall oil recovery factor and decrease the residual oil saturation. Several authors suggested that an increase of 5–40% in oil recovery can be expected due to LSWF compared to the traditional high salinity waterflooding in sandstone reservoirs. In the presented work, a simulation study has been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of LSWF with a detailed sensitivity analysis to understand the effect of various ions present inside the formation brine or injection brine, reservoir temperature, distance between injector and producer, and various other reservoir parameters on oil recovery factor for sandstone reservoirs. Results confirmed the positive effect of LSWF on oil recovery and proved the advantage of sensitivity analysis to find out the optimum values for the injection scheme to obtain the maximum recovery from a given reservoir. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.