This paper presents the design, development and performance of a hybrid cascaded multilevel inverter for fuel cell power conditioning system (PCS). Fuel cell generation systems in particular are expected to see increasing practical usage due to several advantages they offer over conventional generation systems. This article proposes a third harmonic injected phase disposition (THI-PD) pulsewidth modulation strategy for the hybrid seven level cascaded inverter that satisfies the required performance specifications of a fuel cell PCS. A particular advantage of this topology is that the modulation, control and protection requirements of each bridge are modular and it requires only a single dc source in each phase leg. For the cascaded multilevel inverter a variety of modulation strategies have been reported, with the most popular being carrier-based and space vector modulation (SVM). This paper focuses on the FPGA based THIPDPWM method for the hybrid multilevel inverter in PCS. Both the hybrid circuit topology and its control scheme are described in detail and their performance is verified based on simulation and experimental results.