In this technical note, an optimal unbiased filter (OUF) is derived for time-variant systems to relax the initial condition assumption in Kalman filter (KF). By minimizing themean square errors subject to the unbiasedness condition a solution is derived in a batch computation form first. To facilitate the on-line application, a recursive realization is further developed. The effect of removing the initial condition assumption on the estimation performance is analysed, and we show that the proposed algorithm converges to the KF asymptotically. Two-state harmonic model and four-state moving target tracking model are employed to demonstrate that the OUF can improve transient estimation performance significantly and can be used in place of the KF when the apriori information about the initial state values is not available.