For transmission‐line surge studies, the inclusion of corona discharge due to high voltage surges is important as well as the inclusion of frequency‐dependent effects. Because the charge‐voltage (q‐v) curve of a lightning surge is different from that of a switching surge, a corona model should reproduce different q‐v curves for different wave‐front times. The present paper proposes a wave‐front time dependent corona model which can express the dependence by a simple calculation procedure as accurately as a rigorous finite‐difference method which requires an enormous calculation time. The simplicity enhances the incorporation of the corona model into a line model, because a large number of models are to be inserted into the line model by discretization. The q‐v curves calculated by the proposed method agrees well with field tests. This paper also proposes an efficient method to deal with nonlinear corona branches in distributed‐parameter line model using the trapezoidal rule of integration and the predictor‐corrector method. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Electr Eng Jpn, 129(1): 29–38, 1999