The performance of an energy detector is analysed over an η − μ fading channel using the probability density function (PDF) of the received instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio. The η − μ is a generalised multipath fading channel that describes the non-line-of-sight wireless communications scenario. Novel, general, exact and closed-form analytic expressions for both average detection probability and the average area under the receiver operating characteristics curve are derived.Introduction: An energy detector (ED) is widely used to perform spectrum sensing in cognitive radio. This is because it has the lowest complexity in comparison with other methods such as matched filtering [1]. Thus, the performance of EDs has been extensively analysed over different channel models. In [2], the average detection probability (P d ) and the probability of false alarm (P f ) over Nakagami-m and Rice fading channels are evaluated. In [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], the performance of an ED is carried out over different generalised multipath fading channels. In [3,4], the behaviour of an ED over η − μ is studied. The analysis over α − μ which is used to model the non-homogeneous environments is investigated by Fathi and Tawfik [5]. The analysis in a line-of-sight communication scenario, i.e. κ − μ fading channel, is given in [6].It is noted that in [3,4], the moment generating function (MGF) of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is utilised to derive the measurements of metric expressions. However, these expressions are limited with some conditions such as the MGF should be a rational function and the fading parameters should be integer numbers. Although, a unified approach was recently suggested by the authors of [7-9] to solve this problem, it is still restricted with the expression of the MGF that should be in closed form. Furthermore, the final expression is an integral that is impossible to be solved analytically. In addition, in some cases it is difficult to derive the closed-form expression of the MGF. Therefore, the probability density function (PDF) is the best choice studying the performance of EDs with exact and closed-form analytic expressions. This approach was recently investigated by Sofotasios et al.[10], but the expression of P d is still limited by the integer values of the fading parameter. Thus, in this Letter, we derive general closed-form analytic expressions for both the P d and the average area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUC) using the PDF.