Contamination of subsurface systems with industrial solvents and waste materials is a significant environmental problem. Macropores and fractures in soils present important pathways for vertical and lateral movement of contaminants through the subsurface zone to surface and ground water. This study is intended to improve our understanding of solute transport in macroporous soils and to quantify solute transfer between matrix and macropore domains of soil. Various controlled flow and transport experiments were carried out with bromide solution (KBr) in: 1) a homogeneous soil column, 2) a soil column with multiple macropores in one-half of the column cross-section, and 3) a soil column with 1 central macropore. Results from these experiments were compared to study the effect of geometry (number of macropores, density / area fraction of macropores, etc.) under different initial and boundary conditions on flow and conservative solute transport in macroporous soils. Two-dimensional (2D) single-porosity model (SPM), mobile-immobile model (MIM) and dual-permeability model (DPM) with first and second order domain transfer functions for water were used for modeling. The model comparison showed that the increasing model complexity from SPM, MIM, to DPM improved the description of the preferential bromide transport in the column experiments. Our findings also reflected the need to incorporate a second order solute transfer function that takes into account the geometry of the macropores (number, density / area fraction, tortuosity, etc.) and the effect of dominant transport processes.