In this study, a large deflection analysis of a plane frame composed of a thin-walled tube in investigated. When bent, a thin-walled tube is usually controlled by local buckling and subsequent bending collapse of the section. So load resistance reaches the yield level in a thin-walled rectangular tube. This relationship can be divided into three regimes : elastic, post-buckling and crippling. In this paper, this relationship is theoretically presented to be capable of describing nonlinearities and a stiffness matrix is derived by introducing a compound beam-spring element. A numerical analysis uses a constant incremental energy method and the solution is obtained by modifying stiffness matrix at elastic/inelastic stage. This analytical results, load-deflection paths show a good agreement with the test results.