The paper presents a singular perturbation approach to the design of near-optimal controllers with a prescribed degree of stability. All the poles of the resulting closed-loop system are constrained to lie in a half plane Re(s) < −α. where α>0 and α ε (0, α0). The approach presented overcomes difficulties associated with the optimal control design For large-scale systems and does not require a knowledge of the perturbation parameter ϵ. The results are verified through an illustrative numerical example.