Explicita posteriori residual type error estimators in L²(H¹) norm are derived for discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods applied to transport in porous media with general kinetic reactions. They are flexible and apply to all the four primal DG schemes, namely, Oden–Babuška–Baumann DG (OBB-DG), non-symmetric interior penalty Galerkin (NIPG), symmetric interior penalty Galerkin (SIPG) and incomplete interior penalty Galerkin (IIPG). The error estimators use directly all the available information from the numerical solution and can be computed efficiently. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and the effectivity of these theoretical estimators.