A low-profile single-layer half-mode substrate integrated waveguide (HMSIW) filtering antenna with compact circuit size is presented in this brief. The antenna features simple structure and consists of a half-mode substrate integrated waveguide cavity (HMSIWC), a shorted parasitic patch, and a folded defected ground structure (DGS) etched into the metallized ground plane. The half-mode technology is employed to reduce the overall dimension in the design. The shorted parasitic patch and the HMSIWC, both operating at half-mode states, are coupled with each other to form a second-order filtering response. And also a radiation null at higher stopband is introduced owing to the effects of the cross coupling. Furtherly, by etching a folded DGS into the metallized ground plane, an additional resonance in the passband and a controllable radiation null at lower stopband are simultaneously generated to broaden the impedance bandwidth and improve the selectivity of lower stopband respectively. For verification, a prototype of the developed HMSIW filtering antenna is designed, fabricated, and measured. The measured and simulated results are in good agreement, showing a wide impedance bandwidth of 9.2% at center frequency of 2.84 GHz, a flat in-band gain response with two controllable radiation nulls at both edges of the operating band, and a maximum boresight realized gain of 5.75 dBi. The proposed HMSIW filtering antenna demonstrates good in-band and out-of-band performance even with a very low profile of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.015~\mathbf {\mathrm {\lambda }} _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> .