Elastic buckling load of perforated steel plates is typically predicted using the finite element or conjugate load/displacement methods. In this paper an artificial neural network (ANN)-based formula is presented for the prediction of the elastic buckling load of rectangular plates having a circular cutout. By using this formula, the elastic buckling load of perforated plates can be calculated easily without setting up an ANN platform. In this study, the center of a circular cutout was chosen at different locations along the longitudinal x-axis of plates subjected to linearly varying loading. The results of the finite element method (FEM) produced by the commercial software package ANSYS are used to train and test the network. The accuracy of the proposed formula based on the trained ANN model is evaluated by comparing with the results of different researchers. The results show that the presented ANN-based formula is practical in predicting the elastic buckling load of perforated plates without the need of an ANN platform.