In this paper, we present the design and measurement of a side-fed circularly-polarized patch antenna with a dielectric loading. The antenna consists of a comer-truncated rectangular patch, an L-shaped ground plane, a dielectric loading material, and a coaxial probe. An antenna operating at the UHF band (910 MHz) for the RFID reader applications is optimized using a commercial software. The size of the patch is reduced by a factor of 1.73 by loading the patch with mono-cast(MC) nylon. Measurements of the fabricated antenna show performance characteristics comparable to those of much larger commercial RFID reader antennas.