The paper presents a multi-objective planning approach for electrical distribution systems incorporating shunt capacitor banks. In this planning, the number of feeders, feeder routes, and number, locations, and rating of shunt capacitor banks for a distribution system are determined using a multi-objective optimization approach. The objectives considered for this optimization are: (i) total investment cost minimization, (ii) network reliability maximization, (iii) minimization of network power loss, and (iv) minimization of node voltage deviation. The last three objectives are aggregated into a single objective, named as network performance metric. This objective and the first objective are simultaneously optimized to obtain a set of non-dominated solutions. The solution algorithm is Multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO). Three different MOPSO variants are used and their performances are compared. The result of this planning approach is compared with that of the planning without capacitor banks. The proposed planning approach is validated on a 54-node distribution system planning problem. © 2011 IEEE.