A SiC/Si hybrid five-level inverter and its optimized modulation strategy are proposed. The proposed topology consists of four SiC MOSFETs and four Si IGBTs, and it utilizes DC-link split capacitors to achieve a five-level structure. Under the proposed modulation strategy, all the high-frequency switching loss is distributed to the four SiC MOSFETs, while the four Si IGBTs only generate conduction losses and part of the junction capacitor charging and discharging losses. The analysis results of loss modeling show that the proposed SiC/Si hybrid modulation strategy can optimize the loss distribution, fully utilize the low-switching-loss advantage of SiC MOSFET and the low-conduction-loss advantage of Si IGBT under large current conditions. Compared with the full Si scheme, the proposed SiC/Si hybrid scheme significantly improves the conversion efficiency while only slightly adding the hardware cost. Compared with the full SiC topology, the proposed SiC/Si hybrid scheme achieves a similar efficiency while obviously reducing the hardware cost. In addition, under heavy load conditions, the proposed SiC/Si hybrid scheme achieves a higher efficiency than the full SiC scheme. An experimental platform of 4 kW SiC/Si hybrid five-level inverter was built to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed SiC/Si hybrid five-level inverter topology and its optimized modulation strategy.