The unsteady flow field past a backward-facing step in a rectangular duct is investigated by adopting time-resolved particle image velocimetry (PIV) in the Reynolds number range of 2,640–9,880 based on step height and the inlet average velocity. The PIV realizations are subjected to post-processing techniques, namely, proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). At low Reynolds numbers, the second spatial POD modes indicate the presence of the shear layer mode, whereas this feature shifts to higher modes at higher Reynolds numbers. The corresponding temporal modes are Fourier-transformed to obtain the dominant frequency, whose Strouhal number corroborates the above observation. Short-time windows in the transverse velocity component along the shear layer are selected to investigate the temporal stability of the flow field by DMD to quantify the growth rate of the shear layer mode. The higher harmonics of this mode are also observed to grow, albeit at lesser rate. By relating to POD analysis, the most energetic structures were found to correspond to the unstable modes. The correlation between these unstable DMD modes and the Fourier-filtered flow fields for the same frequencies indicate better match for the lower operating Reynolds number case as compared to higher ones. The spatial stability analysis demonstrates the growth of the shear layer vortices, which is combined with the temporal stability analysis to evaluate the phase velocity of the identified shear layer structures. The calculated phase velocity magnitude of the shear layer is found to be reasonably below the local velocity as expected. © 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.