Abstract: According to the engineering theory of plastic bending, the elasto-plastic bending analysis of a beam is conducted using differential quadrature method. Differential quadrature method is a numerical approach for directly solving the governing differential equations of a problem and it is not based on variation principles. Numerical solutions with high accuracy are often obtained with fewer grid points in the method. Numerical results from this approach are compared with those obtained from finite element method and the calculating efficiency and precision are assessed. It is shown that the solutions are not affected by the length of load steps and iteration is avoided. Especially for the elasto-plastic analysis of beams subjected to a distributed load of nonlinearly varying intensity, differential quadrature method has more advantages over finite element method. The stability and convergence of differential quadrature method are also studied.