In this letter, a compact edge-shorted slot microstrip antenna with good near-field performance for radio frequency identification (RFID) applications is proposed. It is composed of a rectangular slot radiator, a shorting wall, and a pair of shorting strips, which occupy a small size of to be easily embedded inside a handheld reader device as an internal antenna. By properly designing a thin slot and a shorting wall, strong and uniform electric field distribution surrounding the near-zone region can be obtained with the antenna. This design can not only achieve an operating band of 2.38–2.55 GHz, but also generate large capacitive coupling effect to significantly enhance the near-field performance for actual application. Experiments exhibit that the proposed patch antenna may well function as a handheld reader antenna to detect the dipole-like tags through capacitive coupling for RFID near-field operation.