Multilevel inverter has become a unique choice in industries at high-power applications. It is mainly due to the high-quality output waveform. Conventional MLIs use many power switches and the design of such a topology is not economical. An improved single-phase MLI is suggested in this article. The circuit consists of reduced number of power switches and hence it possesses a simple control circuitry. The appealing feature of the designed circuit is only a single power switch is switched at a high frequency at anytime during the operation. It minimizes the electromagnetic interference and switching losses in the circuit. The performance of the said topology is investigated using sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) techniques in Simulink software. The performance of the proposed converter is compared with different PWM techniques. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018.