Summary This paper contributes to dynamic surface asymptotic tracking for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems in strict‐feedback form. By utilizing the nonlinear filters with a positive time‐varying integral function, an adaptive state feedback controller is explicitly designed via a dynamic surface approach, where the compensating term with the estimate of an unknown bound is introduced to eliminate the effect raised by the boundary layer error at each step. Compared with the existing results in the literature, the proposed control scheme not only avoids the issue of “explosion of complexity” inherent in the backstepping procedure but also holds the asymptotic output tracking. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.