Electro-hydraulic servo-systems are widely employed in industrial applications such as robotic manipulators, active suspensions, precision machine tools and aerospace systems. They provide many advantages over electric motors, including high force to weight ratio, fast response time and compact size. However, precise control of electro-hydraulic systems, due to their inherent nonlinear characteristics, cannot be easily obtained with conventional linear controllers. Most flow control valves can also exhibit some hard nonlinearities such as dead-zone due to valve spool overlap. This work describes the development of an adaptive fuzzy sliding mode controller for an electro-hydraulic system with unknown dead-zone. The boundedness and convergence properties of the closed-loop signals are proven using Lyapunov stability theory and Barbalat’s lemma. Numerical results are presented in order to demonstrate the control system performance.