© 2016 The Institution of Engineering and Technology. On the basis of thin film hybrid integrated circuit technology, a miniaturised X-band balanced microwave limiter with low insertion loss (IL), low spike and flat leakage power and short recovery time has been presented. The balanced circuit configuration improves the power capacity of the PIN diodes, provides the absorptive load for the reflected power and also effectively tackles the problem of suffering high incident power. The measured results show that the balanced microwave limiter could suffer a pulse with 150 Wpeak power and 3% duty ratio while the leakage power is <10 mW, and the small signal IL of the circuit is <1.4 dB in the frequency range from 8.8 to 9.8 GHz.