The study of symbiotic stars is essential to understand important aspects of stellar evolution in interacting binaries. Their observed population in the Galaxy is however poorly known, and is one to three orders of magnitudes smaller than the predicted population size. IPHAS, the Isaac Newton Telescope Photometric H{alpha} survey of the Northern Galactic plane, gives us the opportunity to make a systematic, complete search for symbiotic stars in a magnitude-limited volume, and discover a significant number of new systems. A method of selecting candidate symbiotic stars by combining IPHAS and near-IR (2MASS) colours is presented. It allows us to distinguish symbiotic binaries from normal stars and most of the other types of H{alpha} emission line stars in the Galaxy. The only exception are T Tauri stars, which can however be recognized because of their concentration in star forming regions.

Cone search capability for table J/A+A/480/409/table1 (Candidate symbiotic stars extracted from the list of Witham et al. (Cat. ) using the photometric constraints defined in Sect 4.3)