Abstract Background In this article, a hybrid photonic crystal fiber has been proposed for chemical sensing. A FEM has been applied for numerical investigation of some propagation characteristics of the PCF at a wider wavelength from 0.7 to 1.7 µm. The geometrical parameters altered to determine the optimized values. The proposed PCF contains three rings of circular holes in the cladding where the core is formulated with microstructure elliptical holes. Results The simulation result reveals that our proposed PCF exhibits high sensitivity and low confinement loss for benzene, ethanol and water than the prior PCFs. We have also shown that our proposed PCF shows high birefringence for benzene 1.544 × 10 −3 , for ethanol 1.513 × 10 −3 and for water 1.474 × 10 −3 at λ = 1.33 µm. Conclusion The proposed PCF is simple with three rings which can be used for the sensing applications of industrially valuable lower indexed chemicals.