Five -phase ac motor drives are nowadays considered for various applications, due to numerous advantages that they offer when compared to three-phase motors. Variable speed induction motor drives without mechanical speed sensors at the motor shaft have the attractions of low cost and high reliability. To replace the sensor, information of the rotor speed is extracted from measured stator currents and voltages at motor terminals. This paper proposes speed estimation method using model reference adaptive system (MRAS) to improve the performance of a sensorless vector controller of five-phase induction motor (IM). In the proposed method, the stator current is used as the state variable to estimate the speed. Since the stator current error is represented as a function of the first degree for the error value in the speed estimation, the proposed method can provide fast speed estimation and is also, more robust to variations in the parameters, compared with other MRAS methods. Consequently, this method can improve the performance of a sensorless vector controller in a low speed region and at zero-speed. The proposed method is verified by simulation using the Matlab/Simulink package. The performance of the proposed system is investigated at different operating conditions. The proposed controller is robust and suitable for high performance five-phase induction motor drives. Simulation results validate the proposed approaches.