Power line communication (PLC) has recently grabbed the attention of the researchers owing to its huge potential to provide high speed access to video and data. Since power lines were not initially designed for communication purposes, they offer a difficult communication environment in the form of impulsive noise and multiplicative noise, in addition to the background noise. This elucidates the need for evaluating the performance of PLC systems by taking into account all these factors. In this paper, we study the performance of a PLC system in the presence of Rayleigh channel gain under the combined effects of Nakagami-m distributed background noise with nonuniformly distributed phase and Middleton class A distributed impulsive noise. We evaluate closed-form expressions of the analytical average bit error rate for different cases depending on the presence or absence of impulsive noise and channel gain. We provide a further insight into the system by obtaining the diversity of the PLC system. Our analysis is validated by a close matching with the simulation results. © 2016 IEEE.