An effective moment of inertia is developed for a rectangular, prismatic elastoplastic beam with elastic, linear-hardening material behavior. The particular solution for a beam with elastic, perfectly plastic material behavior is also presented with applications for beam bending in closed-form. Equations are presented for the direct application of the virtual work method for elastoplastic beams with concentrated and distributed loads. Comparisons are made between the virtual work method deflections and the deflections obtained by using an average effective moment of inertia over two lengths of the beam in the elastoplastic region.