Publisher Copyright: © 2025 The Authors Distribution system (DS) reliability has the greatest impact on customer service availability. Enhancing the reliability level of a DS is a costly task, thus, determining an efficient and economical target levels for reliability indices is of high importance. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a comprehensive Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) based method (DBM). DBM integrates the effect of technical factors in the target determination process for the level of reliability indices in addition to including the conventional average method as one of its steps. By introducing a reliability–cost curve, DBM becomes capable of setting reliability targets based on the practical effect of investment in the system. Furthermore, this feature enables the estimation of the additional investment required to meet the targets. The results indicate the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with the conventional average method from the economic aspect and show the value of integrating the technical factors into it. The determined reliability targets are at least 2.85 % more cost-efficient and technically sounder for the feeders with a high value of reliability. The proposed method, due to its general features, can be applied in the benchmarking of other engineering systems where similar units are being operated and a relation between the unit's inputs and outputs can be established. Peer reviewed