A new dead time compensation scheme that can exactly estimate the dead time and inverter nonlinearity under parameter variations is proposed for a PWM inverter-fed PMSM drive. The proposed scheme uses the fact that the sixth harmonic component in total disturbance estimated under the presence of various uncertainties is mainly caused by the dead time and inverter nonlinearity. The total disturbance due to the parameter variations as well as the dead time and inverter nonlinearity is estimated by the adaptive scheme. The sixth harmonic component is extracted from this total disturbance through harmonic analysis. The obtained sixth harmonic is processed by the PI controller to estimate the disturbance caused by the dead time and inverter nonlinearity in the stationary reference frame. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified. Without requiring an additional hardware, the proposed scheme can effectively compensate the dead time and inverter nonlinearity even under the parameter variations.