This paper presents a control scheme for achieving improved efficiency in a H-bridge buck-boost DC-DC converter. The H-bridge buck-boost converter with conventional control scheme operates at lower efficiency compared to buck and boost converter for the same step down/up action, due to the absence of direct power component. A control scheme is presented in this paper to achieve better efficiency by introducing maximum direct power component without affecting the steady state voltage gain. A hardware prototype of 500 W is tested with the proposed control scheme and an efficiency improvement of 4 % is observed as compared to that of the conventional control. © 2018 IEEE.