The short term (one day) scheduling of VAr controllers involves the setting of shunt compensators, EHV taps and generator voltages. A decomposition approach is presented to solve the problem of optimal short-term scheduling of shunt compensators in this paper. The entire problem is decomposed into two levels: the master and the slave levels. The master level deals with minimization of the depreciation cost of compensators in order to reduce the control actions for compensators while satisfying operating constraints. The slave level treats minimization of capitalized MW losses while satisfying system security constraints by adjusting generator voltages and taps. These two levels interact through linear constraints in the iteration process. The IEEE 30-bus and a practical 265-bus systems, namely Taiwan Power System, are used to serve as samples to show the applicability of the presented approach.