This paper presents both application and comparison of the metaheuristic techniques to multi-area economic dispatch (MAED) problem with tie line constraints considering transmission losses, multiple fuels, valve-point loading and prohibited operating zones. The metaheuristic techniques such as differential evolution, evolutionary programming, genetic algorithm and simulated annealing are applied to solve MAED problem. These metaheuristic techniques for MAED problem are evaluated on three different test systems, both small and large, involving varying degree of complexity and the results are compared against each other.