Abstract Parameter estimation of the soil water retention curve model using Jaya algorithm is studied in this paper. Different from conventional heuristic search algorithms, Jaya algorithm is a swarm intelligence algorithm without algorithm-specific parameters. The effectiveness of Jaya algorithm is validated via estimating parameters of the Van Genuchten model based on collected experimental data of six soil samples. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the difference between the measured and modeled water content while Jaya algorithm is employed to solve this optimization problem. To assess the estimation performance, Jaya algorithm is benchmarked with the Differential Evolution, RETC and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms and computational results prove the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods.