A novel compact coplanar waveguide (CPW)‐fed zeroth‐order resonator (ZOR) is reported in this article. The zeroth‐order mode is required to reduce the resonator's size. The composite right/left handed transmission line (CRLH TL) structure is designed on a single layer via‐less CPW‐fed, which reduces the fabrication complexity and makes the structure more feasible. The resonator has a compact size of 21.6 × 5.2 mm2. The measured insertion loss and return loss of the resonator are −0.72 dB and −21.3 dB, respectively at the resonant frequency, 2.80 GHz. The performance of the proposed ZOR is compared with the previously reported ZORs. All the performance parameters of the resonator are evaluated by full‐wave electromagnetic simulator IE3D, based on the method of moments (MoM) and all the results are verified by measurement. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:2576–2580, 2015