This paper considers the dynamic anti-windup design problem for linear systems with time-varying state delay, input saturations and external disturbances. A dynamic anti-windup compensator is first designed that is dependent on the upper bound of the time-varying delay. Then, using an augmented Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, a distributed-delay-dependent sector condition, some advanced inequalities and some congruence transformations, sufficient conditions are established under which the state trajectories of the closed-loop systems are bounded and meanwhile, the performance can be guaranteed. The anti-windup compensator gain can be explicitly solved by means of linear matrix inequalities. For the case of constant delay, the corresponding result is also presented. Finally, two numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed results.