The role of integer and noninteger order partial differential equations (PDE) is essential in applied sciences and engineering. Exact solutions of these equations are sometimes difficult to find. Therefore, it takes time to develop some numerical techniques to find accurate numerical solutions of these types of differential equations. This work aims to present a novel approach termed as fractional iteration algorithm-I for finding the numerical solution of nonlinear noninteger order partial differential equations. The proposed approach is developed and tested on nonlinear fractional-order Fornberg–Whitham equation and employed without using any transformation, Adomian polynomials, small perturbation, discretization, or linearization. The fractional derivatives are taken in the Caputo sense. To assess the efficiency and precision of the suggested method, the tabulated numerical results are compared with the standard variational iteration method and the exact solution as well. In addition, numerical results for different cases of the fractional-order α are presented graphically, which show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure and revealed that the proposed scheme is very effective, suitable for fractional PDEs, and may be viewed as a generalization of the existing methods for solving integer and noninteger order differential equations.