In this paper, a high efficiency power oscillator is designed at C‐band for the applications of wireless power transmission. A harmonic‐tuning technique is adopted to achieve a high efficiency at a high frequency. It is also shown that the efficiency of the oscillator is degraded due to the reduced gain of the semi‐conductor transistor at high frequency. The fabricated oscillator using GaN transistor shows an output power of 38.1 dBm with an efficiency of 58.4% at 5.71 GHz, which corresponds to the excellent performance among the reported oscillators around 5 GHz. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:2281–2285, 2016