A two-dimensional, steady-state and isothermal model of the proton electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell has been developed numerically, using a commercial package COMSOL. The single channel cell, which consists of seven regions, is used as the computational domain. The governing equations for mass, momentum, mass transport and charge equations are coupled and solved to produce the polarization curves for the fuel cell performance. The resultant polarization curves obtained from the numerical simulation are validated by comparing with the experimental results under normal operating conditions. Further, the benchmarked numerical model is used to investigate the effect of the temperature, concentration of hydrogen, concentration of oxygen, operating pressure, stoichiometric flow ratio, channel height, gas diffusion layer (GDL) thickness, membrane thickness and GDL porosity on the performance of the PEM fuel cell. Acknowledgment The author would like to express his sincere gratitude and appreciation towards the following party, who had helped him in this research work.