In [A. J. Diesl, Classes of strongly clean rings, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkely (2006); Nil clean rings, J. Algebra383 (2013) 197–211], a nil clean ring was defined as a ring for which every element is the sum of a nilpotent and an idempotent. In this short paper, we characterize nil clean commutative group rings.