Abstract: A spline finite element method (spline FEM) based on double cubic B-spline is presented for obtaining an approximate solution for the plane problem of arbitrary quadrilateral region, where the variational method and coordinate transformation are used. The explicit expression is derived. The proposed method is applied on examples to illustrate the efficiency of spline FEM. It is demonstrated that the spline FEM has better convergence, higher accuracy and is more efficient in computing storage. Moreover, the result is less sensitive to mesh distortion.