Volatile organic compounds (VOC) emissions from porous wood-based panel with fractal structure seriously pollute indoor environment. In this paper, a time-fractional mass transfer model is proposed to analyze the anomalous diffusion of VOC emissions from wood-based panel. The time-fractional convective mass transfer boundary condition and mass balance equation are both developed for the first time. The finite difference scheme and the improved Nelder-Mead simplex search and particle swarm optimization are used to optimize the model numerically. Compared with Deng and Kim’s model, the numerical simulation results of present model are in better agreement with the experimental data, and the relative error Re (0.0034%) is much smaller than that of the previous model (0.0257%). This shows that the present model can reveal better the heavy-tailed phenomenon of VOC releases from wood-based panel more accurately. In addition, the influences of the key release parameters on VOC emission are analyzed. The results indicate that higher α, ε, D, N and lower Kma all can promote VOC emission, which can provide theoretical guidance for improving indoor air quality.