Abstract Accurately locating power distribution faults reduces the total outage duration and provides better system reliability. Fault location using the traditional impedance‐based method may be very challenging in an active distribution system. However, taking into consideration the ease of implementation and cost effectiveness, a novel impedance‐based method is proposed to locate the fault by using the highly accurate time‐synchronized voltage and current phasors obtained from distribution phasor measurement units. The synchrophasor measurements obtained from the substation and various feeder segments are used in a two‐step algorithm based on the apparent impedance calculation to locate the exact source of the event. The algorithm uses phasor estimates to first identify the faulted feeder sub‐region and later uses measurements from a remote end device to eliminate pseudo‐faulted points to obtain the actual fault location. The effectiveness of the proposed method is realized using IEEE 34 bus system. Based on different fault types simulated at various parts of the system, the algorithm accurately estimates fault location in the range of ±1% of the line length. The proposed method is effective in locating faults for any type of network and topologies, with as many or as few (minimum 2) phasor measurement units in the system.