In the present paper, single phase multilevel inverter using switched capacitor units is proposed. The switched capacitor unit (SCU) is used in the multilevel inverter will increase the dc supply voltage at the input without using transformer by operating the capacitors in parallel and in series. The SCU comprises one dc source, two semiconductor switches, power diode, and capacitor. The proposed topology does not require the charge balancing operations, which results reducing the cost of the overall circuit. In addition to that, it does not required H-bride module to alter the polarity of the output voltage, which will lead to minimum required semiconductor power switches. The proposed topology is compared with the conventional similar architectures in terms of power semiconductor switches, power diodes, dc power supplies. Finally, to confirm the proposed architecture performance, simulation results are presented. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018.