This work represents the design of a microstrip planar antenna for IoT applications. The antenna comprised of three layers with ground and followed by substrate and patch. The thin layer of the circular patch is developed having radius 9 mm with an area around 254.47 mm2 is designed over the FR4 substrate having dielectric constant 4.3, of dimension 35 × 30 mm2. The ground plane of the antenna is designed below the substrate of the patch having dimensions 8.5 × 30 mm2. Here, we created a finite ground plane to get wideband throughout the desired frequency. The patch and ground are very thin, the thickness around 0.035 mm, and we took a thin copper layer for this. The proposed design provides a wideband. The bandwidth of the designed one is around 4.49 GHz from 2.77 to 7.26 GHz in the sub-6 GHz band with a fractional bandwidth of 89.53%. The prescribed one displays a significant reflection coefficient of − 36.69 at 3.34 GHz. The wideband of the frequency contains three NR bands, i.e., n77, n78, and n79, this also covers partially S-band and C-band. This provides a maximum gain of around 3.615 dBi and a directivity of 4.888 dBi. The proposed design is found suitable for 5G communication and IoT applications.