Abstract Hydrogen has been widely researched as a promising alternative fuel. Steam methane reforming (SMR) coupled with pressure swing adsorption (PSA) is one of the most dominant processes for hydrogen production. In order to reduce the energy consumption, a novel energy saving SMR–PSA H 2 production process by combining heat integration technology has been put forward. In SMR section, the waste heat of reformer and water–gas-shift (WGS) reactors is recovered to pre-heat feed gas and H 2 O. In the view of exergy, a compressor is used to achieve a well heat pairing of sensible and latent heat between hot and cold streams. In PSA section, the generated adsorption heat is recovered by heat pump and reused for regeneration of sorbent. In the total process, optimal heat coupling between hot and cold streams is realized. The simulation results indicated that the SMR and PSA sections in the optimized hydrogen production process can save 55.77 kJ/mol H 2 and 6.01 kJ/mol H 2 , respectively. The total energy consumption of the novel SMR–PSA process can be reduced to 39.5% that of the conventional process.