In today’s world, distributed generation (DG) is an outstanding solution to tackle the challenges in power grids such as the power loss of the system that is intensified by the exponential increase in demand for electricity. Numerous optimization algorithms have been used by several researchers to establish the optimal placement and sizing of DGs to alleviate this power loss of the system. However, in terms of the reduction of active power loss, the performance of these algorithms is weaker. Furthermore, the premature convergence, the precision of the output, and the complexity are a few major drawbacks of these optimization techniques. Thus, this paper proposes the multileader particle swarm optimization (MLPSO) for the determination of the optimal locations and sizes of DGs with the objective of active power loss minimization while surmounting the drawbacks in previous algorithms. A comprehensive performance analysis is carried out utilizing the suggested approach on the standard IEEE 33 bus system and a real radial bus system in the Malaysian context. The findings reveal a 67.40% and an 80.32% reduction of losses in the two systems by integrating three DGs with a unity power factor, respectively. The comparison of the results with other optimization techniques demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed MLPSO algorithm in optimal placement and sizing of DGs.