The design of a compact modified octahedron shaped dual band notched ultra wide-band antenna is presented in this article. The impedance bandwidth of the designed antenna has been enhanced by modifying the shape of the radiator by introducing fractal geometry and a modified ground plane. The proposed antenna offered an impedance bandwidth of 2.4 GHz–19.5 GHz (156% Fractional bandwidth). Two rectangular split ring resonator structures are introduced in the radiator to achieve two notched bands which ranges from 3.3 GHz to 3.7 GHz (WiMAX) and 5.15 GHz–5.85 GHz (WLAN) band. The antenna gain varies from 1 to 4 dBi over the operating band except the notched bands. The overall dimension of the designed antenna has a compact size of 33 × 40 mm2. The experimental and simulation results are in good agreement. The proposed antenna has wider bandwidth and smaller dimension over the already reported in the literature. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 26:426–434, 2016.