• The study of a rotating viscoelastic thin microbeam. • Capturing the influences of viscoelastic behavior via a non-Fourier heat conduction model. • To incorporate the viscoelastic properties of the model in terms of the Kelvin-Voigt scheme. • To reduce the new viscoelastic microbeam model to the elastic beam theory. • The effect of the viscous damping coefficient on the microbeam structure. In this investigation, the system of equations governing the thermoelastic behavior of a rotating viscoelastic microbeam has been derived based on the non-Fourier heat conduction model. The viscoelastic properties of the material are incorporated in terms of the Kelvin-Voigt scheme. This considered microbeam is axially compressed and rotated at a uniform angular velocity in addition to exposing it to a femtosecond laser pulse heat source. The proposed model can be reduced to the thermoelastic beam theory when the viscous and rotation parameters are neglected. To obtain an analytical solution for the studied fields, the Laplace transform technique is applied. The effect of the viscous damping coefficient on the microbeam structure has been studied. Also, the effect of the axial load, laser pulse duration and angular velocity on the thermal and elastic waves of the rotating microbeam has been presented graphically and analyzed in detail.