In Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), providing seamless mobility and balancing load among Access Points (APs) are challenging issues due to simple signal strength based association and hand-off mechanisms employed at wireless clients. Extensions to Software Defined Networking (SDN) framework for wireless networks could help to address theses issues in an efficient and cost-effective manner with a central view of WLAN at the SDN controller. In this work, we propose a novel load-aware hand-off algorithm for SDN based WLAN systems which considers traffic load of APs in addition to received signal strength at wireless clients to solve load imbalance among APs and offer seamless mobility. We implemented the proposed algorithm on a small-scale prototype testbed and obtained improved network throughput for mobile clients as well as static clients compared to legacy hand-off algorithms used in WLANs. © 2014 IEEE.