This paper focuses on the fuzzy guaranteed cost $$H\infty$$ control problem for uncertain nonlinear vehicle active suspension system with random actuator time delay. Its main contribution to the literature is that a fuzzy guaranteed cost $$H\infty$$ controller (FGCHC) is proposed to ensure the resulting closed-loop vehicle active suspension system to be asymptotically stable and guarantee the performance index to be less than a preset upper bound. More specifically, taking the varying masses and the uncertainties caused by random actuator delay into consideration, a discrete-time Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model for vehicle active suspension is obtained based on an augmented vector, which is without explicit of random actuator delay. By employing the Lyapunov stability theory and the linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach, the existence condition and the design approach for proposed FGCHC are presented. Meanwhile, the computability for proposed FGCHC is guaranteed by solving a corresponding convex optimization problem. By analyzing performance requirements for vehicle active suspension under different simulation scenarios, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed FGCHC can offset the vibration and compensate the varying masses and uncertainties for vehicle active suspension effectively.