The battery of an electric vehicle (EV) needs to be recharged when it is exhausted. So charging stations must be extensively installed to sufficiently serve a number of electric vehicles, especially in residential areas. Since electric charging stations will be used simultaneously by many EVs, they should be optimally placed in areas of dense traffic for minimum total cost of the fast charging station and minimum total loss of distribution network. In this paper, number of fast charging stations in a residential area is calculated and an optimization model of fast charging station planning is proposed to minimize these objectives subject to distribution line constrains and traffic condition. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is employed to solve the problem. An IEEE 69-bus system in a residential area is used to verify the proposed technique. The results show that ACO method found the best location of fast charging station on residential power distribution with minimum total cost or loss while satisfying many technical and geographical constraints. © 2014 Asian Institute of Technology.