In this paper, we focused on the design of an adaptive backstepping controller (adaptive-BSC) for direct power control (DPC) of a three-phase PWM rectifier. In the proposed system, it is desired to control both the output DC voltage of the rectifier and the reactive power simultaneously by making them track desired respective values. This was done by having independent virtual control signals for both the output voltage and the reactive power. The adaptive control signals were gotten from the dynamic equations of the three-phase system. For comparison, both the BSC and adaptive-BSC equations were developed. Numerical simulations were performed on both of them on a 5kW system. The proposed adaptive-BSC was designed to work under more challenging system variations as compared with the BSC as it has to estimate the value of the unknown system load. Despite this, it still performed better than its BSC counterpart.