Abstract: As previous earthquakes have highlighted that the bottom story in RC frames is always damaged more seriously than the upper stories, an innovative seismic passive control system of stepped walls was introduced. Stepped wall systems add reinforced concrete walls of the same thickness but different widths into the frames. The advantage of stepped wall-frame structure was demonstrated by IDA analysis and a shake table comparison test. Results showed that the stepped wall system can effectively control the structural deformation and damage distribution, suppress emergence of the bottom yielding mechanism, and is simple, economical, and practical for large scale application. Finally, a design procedure based on the nonlinear static analysis was proposed.