Short-term load forecasting plays a vital role in the daily operational management of power utility. To improve the forecasting accuracy, this paper proposes a hybrid EMD-PSO-SVR forecastingmodel for short-termload forecasting based on empiricalmode decomposition (EMD), support vector regression (SVR), and particle swarm optimization (PSO), also considering the effects of temperature, weekends, and holidays. EMDis used to decompose the residential electric load data into a number of intrinsicmode function (IMF) components and one residue; then SVR is constructed to forecast these IMFs and residual value individually. In order to gain optimization parameters of SVR, PSO is implemented to automatically perform the parameter selection in SVR modeling. Then all of these forecasting values are reconstructed to produce the final forecasting result for residential electric load data. Compared with the results from the EMD-SVR model, traditional SVR model, and PSO-SVR model, the result indicates that the proposed EMD-PSO-SVR model performs more effectively and more stably in forecasting the residential short-term load.