The internal model control (IMC) proportional integral derivative (PID) controller tuning rules provide an excellent tracking of set-point, but sluggish disturbance rejection, as the conventional IMC filter introduces slow process pole. Disturbance rejection is significant than set-point tracking in many industrial applications. This paper proposes the design of IMC-PID controller, cascaded with lead-lag filter, with an improved IMC filter to provide effective disturbance rejection and robust operation of the first-order processes (FOPs). The simulation study was conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method on various structures of the FOPs, calculating the controller parameters, maintaining similar robustness in terms of maximum sensitivity M S . Perturbations were incorporated in the parameters of the plant model simultaneously, for the robustness analysis of the controller. The closed-loop performance was evaluated with the integral error criteria, namely, integral absolute error, integral square error, and integral time absolute error. The proposed IMC filter provided good disturbance rejection. The results of recently published design methods were compared with that obtained from the proposed method, validating the usefulness of the proposed method.