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The paper deals with the analysis of the effective stiffness of stiffened metallic panels under combined compression and shear stress as used, e.g. in aircraft fuselages. An important criterion for sizing and certification of aircraft fuselages is the local and global buckling behaviour. For optimisation of stiffened metallic panels it is necessary to know the buckling and postbuckling behaviour as accurately as possible. Due to the fact that nonlinear FE analyses of a whole aircraft fuselage are too time consuming, a very fast quasi nonlinear FE analysis with a coarse mesh under consideration of semi-empirical methods for the effective skin-stiffness are used. At this point the effective stiffness method derived in this paper is used. Admittedly previous semi-empirical methods like the effective width method [J. Wiedemann, Leichtbau 1: Elemente, second ed., 1996; M.C.Y. Niu, Airframe Stress Analysis and Sizing, second ed., Commilit. Press Ltd., 1999] (only for pure compression load) or the method of Kuhn [P. Kuhn, J.P. Peterson, L.R. Levin, A summary of diagonal tension part I – methods of analysis, Technical Note 2661, NACA, 1952] (only for pure shear load) have disadvantages for the general combined compression and shear load case. This is improved in the current method. The first part of the paper deals with the realisation of the compression and shear test facility in a finite element model. The verification of the finite element model is important for subsequent parameter variations. The second part of the paper presents the approach of how to assess the effective skin-stiffness. In comparison to the paper in [M. Heitmann, P. Horst, D. Fitzsimmons, Effective stiffness of postbuckled stiffened metallic panels under combined compression and shear stress, J. Strain Anal. 38 (6) (2003) 534–555] many new parameters have been analysed. Therefore the new approach for the geometrically nonlinear analysis derived from the finite element results for combined compression and shear stress is considerably improved. At the end of the paper the great benefit of the new approach is shown. The results of very fast quasi nonlinear FE analyses under consideration of the new approach for the effective skin-stiffness on a coarse panel mesh agree well with the results of time expensive nonlinear FE analysis on a very fine panel mesh. Further studies are necessary to expand the new method to the influence of plasticity.