A novel reaching law‐based sliding mode controller is proposed for a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) speed regulation system with uncertainties and unknown load torque in this paper. The proposed reaching law is the improvement of the traditional power rate reaching law (PRL) by using a simple tuning function of the sliding variable. The tuning function is designed such that the reaching speed is fast when the system states are far away from the sliding surface, and vice versa. Theoretical analysis shows that the reaching time of the proposed reaching law is always shorter than that of the traditional PRL with the same gains. Moreover, unlike the traditional PRL and some existing auto‐tuning PRLs, the proposed reaching law can provide globally bounded reaching time independently on the initial conditions, and the reaching time can be effectively reduced by tuning the reaching law gains. Based on this novel reaching law, a disturbance observer is designed to estimate the total disturbance, and then based on the estimated disturbance and the novel reaching law, a sliding mode speed controller is designed for the robust control of PMSM speed regulation system. Simulations and experiments are carried out to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed control method.