In the present study, we report the synthesis of a series of anthracene based polyfluorenes containing alkyl substituted 9,10-diphenylanthracene and hydrazone substituted fluorene moieties. The polymers were synthesized via copper catalysed Ullmann coupling, which comparatively is inexpensive as compared to palladium and platinum used in Suzuki coupling. The synthesized polymers were characterized by various spectroscopic techniques. All the polymers exhibited blue emission having band gap in the range of 2.7–2.83 eV. The polymers showed good thermal stability with decomposition temperature over 330 °C and glass transition temperature in the range of 125–140 °C. All the polymers were soluble in common organic solvents with weight average molecular weight in the range of 21,000–25,000. The electrochemical study reveals that the HOMO energy levels of the polymers were in the range of - 5.16 to - 5.26 eV which had elevated compared with that of polyfluorene (5.7 eV). It matched the work function of ITO and ITO/PEDOT: PSS (4.7 and 5.0 eV respectively). These results indicated that the synthesized polymers could be promising materials for applications in light emitting diode.