This paper proposes a novel active frequency drift (AFD) method to improve the islanding detection performance with minimum current harmonics. To detect the islanding phenomenon of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) inverters concerning the safety hazards and possible damage to other electric equipment, anti-islanding methods have been described. The AFD method that uses chopping fraction (cf) enables the islanding detection to drift up (or down) the frequency of the voltage during the islanding situation. However, the performance of the conventional AFD method is inefficient and causes difficulty in designing the appropriate cf value to meet the limit of harmonics. In this paper, the periodic chopping fraction based on a novel AFD method is proposed. This proposed method shows the analytical design value of cf to meet the test procedure of IEEE Std. 929-2000 with power quality and islanding detection time. To verify the validation of the proposed method, the islanding test results are presented. It is confirmed that the proposed method has not only less harmonic distortion but also better performance of islanding detection compared with the conventional AFD method.