Disclosed is a method and a system for recognizing a target parking location of a vehicle. The system includes a scanning laser radar for detecting range data reflected and directed from a rear surface of the vehicle; a preprocessing unit for preprocessing the range data to extract effective clusters; a corner recognition unit for extracting obstacle corners from the effective clusters; and a parking location setting unit for recognizing a main reference corner, which is closest to a subjective vehicle and has an adjacent space satisfying an available parking space condition, and a sub reference corner, which exists toward the adjacent space in a direction opposite to a vehicle width direction from the main reference corner, and corresponds to a point on a closest effective cluster within a distance between a vehicle width and a vehicle length, from the obstacle corners to set a target parking location.