This paper presents unplanned and smart charging of Electric Vehicles (EV’s) in residential distribution systems. EVs are becoming attractive solution due to zero emission and efficient mode of transportation compared to conventional vehicles based on internal combustion engines. Electric Vehicle chargers are considered as irregular loads, which can affect the performance of distribution systems. Power utilities are facing challenges of possible overburdens, stresses, deviations in voltages and power losses from EV charging stations. The distribution network faces the possibilities of power outages and frequent voltage variations, which might be the result of unmanaged EV charging. This paper put forward a Smart Load Management (SLM) control methodology to control and manage several EV charging activities to reduce the stress on the distribution network and to improve distribution system reliability, security and the performance. Residential distribution system is simulated in MATLAB with unplanned charging of electric vehicles and results have been presented. The same residential distribution system is simulated with proposed algorithm and results are compared with unplanned charging of electric vehicles. © 2019 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.