This paper presents a new design for a small modular sodium-cooled fast reactor core with an optimized lifetime and reactivity swing through the analysis of various breed-and-burn strategies and its neutronic analyses in terms of active core movements, isotopic mass balance, kinetic parameters, and inherent safety. The new core design aims at a power level of 260MW with a long lifetime of 30 years without refueling and a reactivity swing smaller than 1000 pcm. Starting from five initial candidate cores with various breed-and-burn strategies, an optimum core was selected from a combination of the two candidates that shows a proper breeding behavior with the optimized uranium enrichment in the low-enriched uranium region and the optimized size of the blanket region. The depletion analysis of the new core provides various reactor design parameters such as the core multiplication factor, breeding ratio, heavy metal mass change, power distribution, and summary of neutron balance. In addition, the perturbation analysis provides the reactor kinetic parameters and reactivity feedback coefficients for the inherent safety analysis of the core. The integral reactivity parameters of the quasi-static reactivity balance analysis demonstrate that the new core is inherently safe in cases of unprotected loss of flow, unprotected loss of heat sink, and unprotected transient over power. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.