The present work is intended to study the effect of variation of seismic area source zone on hazard value for Chennai, India. In the conventional Cornell-McGuire approach to probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, the seismic activity rate for an area source is most often determined using the Gutenberg-Richter (G-R) recurrence law. The seismic area is delineated using geology, geography and/or seismotectonic characteristics of the region. However if the area lies in a distributed seismicity region, the delineation into different area zones introduces subjectivity. The impact of the areal extent of seismic area zone on the final hazard value is studied using two approaches - the conventional Cornell-McGuire and zone-free approaches. It is observed that in the conventional Cornell-McGuire approach, the peak ground acceleration decreases when the area source zone is increased while maintaining all other seismicity parameters same. In the kernel method, the PGA remained unchanged though the seismic source area is increased. This is due to the fact that in the kernel method, the seismic activity rate is a spatially varying parameter unlike the seismic activity rate determined from the G-R recurrence law, which assumes a homogeneous distribution of the activity rate for each of the area source zones. The uniform hazard spectra are obtained for various return periods by both the approaches. It is observed that in the Cornell-McGuire approach, the variation in the extent of seismic source area has little effect on longer return periods as compared to the smaller return periods. Copyright © 2014, IGI Global.