In the article, “Windowed special affine Fourier transform” in J. Pseudo-Differ. Oper. Appl. (2020), we introduced the notion of windowed special affine Fourier transform (WSAFT) as a ramification of the special affine Fourier transform. Keeping in view the fact that the WSAFT is not befitting for in the context of non-stationary signals, we continue our endeavor and introduce the notion of the special affine wavelet transform (SAWT) by combining the merits of the special affine Fourier and wavelet transforms. Besides studying the fundamental properties of the SAWT including orthogonality relation, inversion formula and range theorem, we also demonstrate that the SAWT admits the constant [Formula: see text]-property in the time–frequency domain. Moreover, we formulate an analog of the well-known Poisson summation formula for the proposed SAWT.