Ce3+ substituted barium hexaferrite Ba1−xCeXFe12O19 (x = 0.25, 0.5, 0.75) ferrite samples were synthesized by ceramic technique. Besides the simple hexaferrite phase structure, the all three of the as-prepared barium hexaferrites have small amount of CeO2 phases. The phase composition is studied using X-ray diffractometer. The structure morphology is carried out using scanning electron microscopy. The magnetic properties of these ferrites were characterized by employing vibrating sample magnetometer. The complex intrinsic parameters and the electromagnetic properties such as reflection loss (RL), absorption loss (AL), shielding effectiveness (SE) were measured by using transmission/reflection coaxial airline method in the range of 4–16 GHz. The doping of Ce3+ ions has to lead to changes in the phase of the crystal structure to dual phase including barium hexaferrite and cerium oxide. The results present that the obtained composition has a maximum RL value of − 25.7 dB and maximum SE value of 42.3 dB at 10.7 GHz. From these results it was concluded that the synthesized samples had good potential as absorbers in the gigahertz frequency range.