This article presents experimental measurements of breaking wave impact loads  on a vertical cylinder. The focus is on the influence of some of the breaking wave  properties on the measured force. These properties are the distance to breaking,  δ, defined as the distance between the breaking location and the front face of  the cylinder, and the breaking strength, characterised here by the Γ parameter  proposed by Derakhti et al. (2018). The wave characteristics are obtained through  numerical simulations of the breaking waves using a fully non-linear potential  flow solver. Seven breaking waves with different breaking strengths have been  considered. For each wave, the distance to breaking has been systematically varied  and the resulting impact force time-history was measured. It is found that except  for the two less intense breaking cases, corresponding to values of Γ lower than  one, there is a value of δ for which the magnitude of the impact force is maximum.  Small variations of the distance to breaking δ strongly influence the impact force  time-history and its maximum. A linear relationship is observed between the  maximum force and the breaking strength Γ. For the wave cases with values of  Γ higher than one, the maximum impact force is observed when the distance  to breaking δ is close to 5 % of the wavelength. An empirical wave slamming  coefficient accounting for the distance to breaking δ and the breaking strength Γ  is derived.