Significant amount of work has been done in the field of fractional order control. However fractional controllers have been applied usually to stable processes regardless of actuator saturation. In this paper, a new concept to remove the actuator saturation as well as stabilizing the open-loop unstable system simultaneously has been introduced based on the fractional order control theory. As a benchmark problem, magnetic levitation system (MLS) Feedback 33-210 is used here. The restructuring of $$PI^\lambda $$ PIλ controller dematerializes the requirement of dedicated anti-windup scheme for removing the actuator saturation problem. In addition, to further improve the performance of system, a novel hybrid anti-windup scheme is proposed. The stability analysis of overall system has been carried out by drawing the fractional order root locus in both s-plane and w-plane. Experimental demonstration of proposed scheme on MLS affirm the potential of controller, to reject actuator saturation as well as stabilize the system.