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The objective of the study presented in this paper is to investigate the effects of masonry infills on the shear demand and failure of columns for the case when reinforced concrete frames with such infills are modeled by means of simplified nonlinear models that are not capable of the direct simulation of these effects. It is shown that an approximate simulation of the shear failure of columns can be achieved through an iterative procedure that involves pushover analysis, post‐processing of the analysis results using limit‐state checks of the components, and model adaptation if shear failure of columns is detected. The fragility parameters and the mean annual frequency of limit‐state exceedance are computed on the basis of nonlinear dynamic analysis by using an equivalent SDOF model. The proposed methodology is demonstrated by means of two examples. It was shown that the strength of the four‐story and seven‐story buildings and their deformation capacity are significantly overestimated if column shear failure due to the effects of masonry infills is neglected, whereas the mean annual frequency of limit‐state exceedance for the analyzed limit states is significantly larger than that estimated for the case if the shear failure of columns is neglected. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.