Power line communication (PLC) deals with the transmission of data through the use of power lines. It is an emerging field of communication for the home area network of smart grid. The presence of the additive and multiplicative power line noises significantly affects the performance of PLC systems. There are two types of additive noises in PLC systems, namely background noise and impulsive noise. The multiplicative PLC noise results in fading in the received signal strength. The Rician fading model has been experimentally found to be applicable to the PLC systems and has been widely used in conventional and current literature on PLC. In this paper, we provide the performance analysis of a PLC system over Rician fading channel under Nakagami-m distributed additive background noise assuming binary phase shift keying modulation scheme. We derive the probability density function of the decision variable and the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A closed-form expression of the outage probability of the considered system is obtained. The validity of the derived analytical expressions is closely verified by the simulated results. © 2015 IEEE.