Abstract Fresh fish contains up to 80% of water. It is a highly perishable material and having a short storage life. Therefore, the study of the drying kinetics of fish is necessary. In this study, the effect of microwave drying on drying rate, effective diffusivity, and energy consumption of sardine fish was examined at four different microwave powers (200, 300, 400 and 500 W). It was found that the moisture content was reduced from 2.76 to 0.01 (dry basis) and drying time of the samples was significantly reduced from 9.5 to 4.25 min as the power input increased. Five thin layer drying mod- els were fitted to drying data. The Midilli model was selected as the best according to R2, v2 and RMSE. The drying of fish samples took place in the falling rate period and was governed by mois- ture diffusion. The effective diffusivity varied from 7.158 · 10