The stiffness of an engineering structure with joints depends not only on the materials and dimensions of the structure but also on the stiffness of the fasteners that connect its components. To evaluate the mechanical behaviour of a complex structure with bolted joints, it is important to develop a simple finite element (FE) modelling technique that accounts for the effect of the joints on stiffness. In this study, we developed a modelling technique that simplifies bolted joint structures by using shell and beam elements. It was found that the stiffness of the beam element was related to the stiffness of the jointed plates and the bolt. We set the equivalent pressure area on the bearing surface region and the nodes in the equivalent pressure area were connected to the beam element as a rigid region by using constraint equations. We measured the eigenvalues of test pieces and calculated them by FE analysis. The analytical eigenvalues were found to agree well with the experimental results. Using this modelling method of bolted joints makes it possible to evaluate the supporting force of each bolt in any structure with a large number of bolted joints.