For any switching frequency, multilevel inverters produce better harmonic profile compared to basic 2-level inverters. Among the available multilevel inverters topologies in the literature, some of the topologies like neutral point clamped (NPC) or diode clamped, flying capacitor (FC) or capacitor clamped, and H-bridge are conventionally used. However, the NPC and FC type inverter topologies comprises the capacitor voltage balancing issue, and the H-bridge requires more number of isolated DC voltage sources and semiconductor switches. To overcome the issues encountered with the conventional topologies, a new single-phase 5-level inverter topology by excluding the capacitor components and with a reduced number of semiconductor switches is proposed in this paper. A reduced number of levels is also achieved with the proposed topology under certain fault conditions. © 2018 IEEE.