Most ships and offshore structures are equipped with a variety of pipes, which inevitably contain curved portions. While it has been a usual practice to conduct bending stress analyses of these curved pipes using the straight-beam theory, this paper adopts two different types of finite elements, straight-beam elements and two-dimensional shell elements, for finite element analyses of a variety of curved pipes. It then compares the analysis results for two different types of elements to determine correction factors, which can be used to transform the bending displacements and bending stresses obtained by straight-beam elements to those obtainable by two-dimensional shell elements. The paper ends with a practical suggestion on how to efficiently use these correction factors to estimate the combined axial and normal stresses in a curved portion of a pipe.