Higher heating value (HHV) and composition of biomass, coal and other solid fuels, are important properties which define the energy content and determine the clean and efficient use of these fuels. There exists a variety of correlations for predicting HHV from ultimate analysis of fuels. However, the ultimate analysis requires very expensive equipments and highly trained analysts. The proximate analysis on the other hand only requires standard laboratory equipments and can be run by any competent scientist or engineer. A few number of correlations of HHV with proximate analysis have appeared in the solid fuel literature in the past but were focused on one fuel or dependent on the country of origin. This work introduces a general correlation, based on proximate analysis of solid fuels, to calculate HHV, using 450 data points and validated further for additional 100 data points. The entire spectrum of solid carbonaceous materials like coals, lignite, all types of biomass material, and char to residue-derived fuels have been considered in derivation of present correlation which is given as below: HHV = 0.3536FC + 0.1559VM - 0.0078ASH (MJ/kg) (where FC 1.0-91.5 % fixed carbon, VM 0.92-90.6 % volatile matter and Ash 0.12-77.7 % ash content in wt% on a dry basis). The average absolute error of this correlation is 3.74 % and bias error is 0.12 % with respect to the measured value of HHV, which is much less than that of previous correlations of the similar kind. The major advantage of this correlation is its capability to compute HHV of any fuel simply from its proximate analysis and thereby provides a useful tool for modeling of combustion, gasification and pyrolysis processes. It can also be used in examining old/new data for probable errors when results lie much outside the predicted results. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.