A nonlinear speed control for a permanent-magnet (PM) synchronous motor using a simple disturbance estimation technique is presented. By using a feedback linearization scheme, the nonlinear motor model can be linearized in the Brunovski canonical form, and the speed controller can be easily designed based on the linearized model. This technique, however, gives an undesirable output performance under the mismatch of the system parameters and load conditions. An adaptive linearization technique and a sliding-mode control technique have been reported. Although good performance can be obtained, the controller designs are quite complex. To overcome this drawback, the controller parameters are estimated by using a disturbance observer theory where the disturbance torque and flux linkage are estimated. Since only the two reduced-order observers are used for the parameter estimation, the observer designs are considerably simple and the computational load of the controller for parameter estimation is negligibly small. The nonlinear disturbances caused by the incomplete linearization can be effectively compensated by using this control scheme. Thus, a desired dynamic performance and a zero steady-state error can be obtained. The proposed control scheme is implemented on a PM synchronous motor using a digital signal processor (TMS320C31) and the effectiveness is verified through the comparative simulations and experiments.