Secondary decay of an ion‐acoustic wave is shown to provide an efficient saturation mechanism for stimulated Brillouin scattering in underdense plasma (n<0.5ncr). Phase effects and linear damping of ion waves are included in the analysis. In the weak damping regime, secondary decay dominates linear damping providing efficient saturation of Brillouin scattering. Heavy linear damping of ion waves increases the threshold for secondary decay considerably and very small densities are required to obtain saturation.