In this study the effect and applicability of viscoelastic dampers on the seismic reinforcement of steel framed structures are investigated in the context of the performance based design approach. The effect of the damper on dissipating the input seismic energy was investigated with a single degree of freedom system. For analysis models a five-story steel frame subjected to gravity load, a ten-story and twenty-story structure subjected to gravity and wind load were designed. The code-specified design spectrums were constructed for each soil type and performance objective, and artificial ground excitation records to be used in the nonlinear time history analysis were generated based on the design spectrums. Inter-story drift was adopted as the primary performance criterion. According to the analysis results, all model structures turned out to satisfy the performance level for most of the soil conditions except for the soft soil(operational level). It was also found that the seismic performance could be greatly enhanced, and the structures were led to behave elastically by installing viscoelastic dampers on appropriate locations.