The stability and disturbance attenuation for nonlinear timedelay systems represented by TakagiSugeno (T-S) fuzzy models were studied.A new criteria on delaydependent stability with optimal performance for the nonlinear delay systems was presented in terms of linear matrix inequality (LMI). The criteria is less conservative than some previous results and can still be used even if the timederivative of the time-delay is larger than 1. The practical applicability of the proposed method was illustrated by a numerical example.