In this work, a Schottky junction on the drain side employing low workfunction (WF) metal is proposed as a method to suppress the OFF-state leakage in nanowire (NW) field-effect transistor (FET). Instead of a highly n+ doped drain, low WF metal with negative electron Schottky-barrier height (SBH) as a drain minimizes the lateral band-to-band tunneling (L-BTBT) considerably. L-BTBT is the movement of carriers (holes) from the drain conduction band (CB) into the channel valence band (VB) during the OFF-state. Impact of varying WF at channel-drain junction on the device characteristics is studied. It is observed that SBH60 eV is required to mitigate L-BTBT compared to the conventionally-doped and junctionless (JL) NW counterpart. Furthermore, unlike L-BTBT, leakage in NW Schottky-drain (SD) comprises of holes tunneling through the SB from the metal drain into the channel and termed as the lateral SB tunneling (L-SBT). In contrast to JL NW FET, the process variation immunity (varying channel doping, NCh and NW diameter, dNW ) and the ON-state current of the proposed device is not compromised at the expense of lower OFF-state LSBT. Instead, the device is less susceptible to process variations and retains the ON-state performance of the NW MOSFET. For a ±20% change in NCh, ∆IOF F /IOF F of 7% compared to 97% in NW JL FET is observed.