Glucocorticoids action have been related to modulation of memory. Most of studies have examined the influence of glucocorticoids separately for encoding, consolidation and retrieval but none of them explored these three stages at the same time. Furthermore, most of them explore their effects on item memory but little is known about associative memory. We decided to fill these gaps by employing a within-subject design to investigate the effects of cortisol administration at different memory stages on item and associative memory. Participants encoded pairs of nouns and images with different emotionality (negative valence and high arousal or neutral valence and low arousal) and 24h apart undertook recognition tasks for both individual items (nouns) and associative pairs. Findings shown divergent patterns of item and associative memory: administration of cortisol after encoding enhanced item memory while impaired it when cortisol was administered before encoding or before retrieval. Furthermore, administration prior to encoding decreased neutral associative memory. Moreover, we did not find any relationships between cortisol levels and memory performance. These findings highlight how cortisol administration, across memory stages, differently modulates item and associative memory.