This work provides an analytical investigation of the time-fractional Kundu–Eckhaus (KE) equation. We use the symmetry of the Lie group as an appropriate tool which deals with the wide class of fractional-order differential equations in Riemann–Liouville sense. In the current work, firstly, we employ classical Lie symmetries to obtain similarity reductions of nonlinear generalised time-fractional KE equation. At the final step, we find relevant exact solutions for the extracted generators.