As the increasing number of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) are deployed, wide area protection in power systems has been gaining interest. In particular, fault detection, fault classification and fault area estimation are essential to reduce the damage of faults, and even prevent catastrophic cascades of failures. In this paper, we present a scheme for fault area estimation using PMUs and traveling wave theory. The purpose of this paper is to formulate a scheme for fault area estimation by calculating the approximate fault location based on traveling wave theory. This research has targeted at reliable operation of wide transmission system through the estimation of fault area. To verify the suggested scheme, the various simulations are performed in practical Korean power transmission system. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has a good performance with high accuracy for estimating fault area.