This work reports, the facile surfactant assisted sonochemical route for the synthesis of hollow zinc phosphate nanoparticles. The prepared material was analyzed by Fourier transform infrared, X-ray diffraction, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller nitrogen adsorption/desorption isotherms, field emission scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and thermo gravimetric analysis confirm the successive formation of well-organized hollow spherical structure of zinc phosphate. The diameter and the shell thickness of the hollow particles are typically in the range of 20-40 nm and 5-7 nm respectively. The specific surface area and the total pore volume of the synthesized hollow zinc phosphate nanoparticles were found to be 100.15 m(2)/g and 0.1384 cm(3)/g respectively. A possible growth mechanism for the formation of hollow zinc phosphate nanospherical structures has been proposed, which is considered to be a sonochemically induced a surfactant vesicle-template formation. The prepared hollow zinc phosphate nanoparticles exhibits a sustained release behavior about 76.5 wt.% and 5.7 wt.% of the total loaded imidazole into the solution after 50 h at pH 6 and 10 respectively. The imidazole loaded hollow zinc phosphate nanoparticles can be potentially applied as a corrosion inhibitor in paint formulation. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.