Harmonic distortion in power systems has increased considerably due to the increasing use of nonlinear loads in industrial firms and elsewhere. This distortion can give rise to overheating in all sectors of the power system, leading to reduced efficiency, reliability, operational life and sometimes failure. This article seeks to propose a new methodology for the optimal sizing of hybrid active power filter (HPF) parameters in order to overcome the difficulties in hybrid power filters design when estimating the preliminary feasible values of the parameters. Sequential Quadratic Programming based on FORTRAN subroutines is used to find out the planned filter size in two different optimization criteria depending on design concerns. The first criterion is to minimize the total voltage harmonic distortion. The second one is to maximize the load power factor, while taking into account compliance with IEEE standard 519-1992 limits for the total voltage harmonic distortion and the power factor.The effectiveness of the proposed filter is discussed using four exemplary cases.