Herein, we report thermal and rheological investigations on PAM nanocomposite hydrogels that are cross-linked with N,N’ methylenebis acrylamide (MBA) in presence of Zr(OH)4 and Zr(OH)4G fillers with a potential for water shutoff applications. The fillers such as Zr(OH)2 or their composites Zr(OH)4G were found to enhance the thermal and mechanical characteristics of the PAM hydrogels in addition to the organic cross-linker. The samples were prepared with different weight percentages of MBA with and without the presence of fillers. The samples were characterized by dynamic scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermogravimetric analyses (TGA) and dynamic mechanical analyses (DMA). Upon investigating the thermal properties of the hydrogels, the neat-PAM hydrogels have shown a maximum of the bound water content of 0.45 with 0.3 wt% of MBA while the PAM-Zr(OH)4 with 0.3 wt% of MBA cross-linker had higher bound water of 0.41. However, when Zr(OH)4G was used as a filler, the ones with 0.15 wt% of MBA showed a higher bound water content of 0.35. The TGA results revealed that there is a significant increase in the degradation temperature (Tg = 181°C) for the neat-PAM hydrogel with 0.3 wt% of MBA in comparison to that of neat-PAM with 0.15 wt% of MBA (175°C), indicating that the chain mobility of the polymer matrix at a lower temperature was decreased when the cross-linker concentration was increased. For the PAM-Zr(OH)4 and PAM-Zr(OH)4G nanocomposites, the Tg were found to be higher with 0.3 wt% of MBA in comparison to the ones with 0.15 and 0.6 wt%. The gel strength for neat-PAM is calculated to be 13.5 and that of PAM-Zr(OH)4 and PAM-Zr(OH)4G nanocomposite hydrogels are 4.2 and 12.8 respectively. In contrast to the gel strength, the PAM-Zr(OH)4 nanocomposite hydrogel displayed a high damping factor (tan δ = 0.23) in comparison to that of PAM-Zr(OH)4G (0.08) and neat-PAM (0.07).