Control of three-phase power converters in the synchronous reference frame is now a mature and well developed research topic. However, for single-phase converters, it is not as well-established as three-phase applications. This paper deals with the design of a synchronous reference frame multi-loop control strategy for single phase inverter-based islanded dis-tributed generation (DG) systems. The proposed controller uses a synchronous reference frame PI (SRFPI) controller to regulate the instantaneous output voltage, a capacitor current shaping loop in the stationary reference frame to provide active damping and improve both transient and steady-state performances, a voltage decoupling feedforward to improve the system robustness, and a multi-resonant harmonic compensator to prevent low-order load current harmonics to distort the inverter output voltage. Since, the voltage loop works in the synchronous reference frame, it is not straightforward to fine-tune the control parameters and evaluate the stability of the whole closed loop system. To overcome this problem, the stationary reference frame equivalent of the voltage loop is derived. Then, a step-by-step systematic design procedure based on a frequency response approach is presented. Finally, the theoretical achievements are supported by experimental results. Index Terms—Single-phase inverter, stand-alone mode, multi-loop, synchronous reference frame (SRF).