Deep beams are commonly encountered in structural system as transfer girders, pile caps, and pier caps etc. The deep beams are shear critical rather than flexure. Shear strength of beam increases with decreasing shear span-to-depth ratio (a/d). Consistency of the existing shear strength models has been studied using 776 data points obtained on simply supported deep beams with low a/d ratio. It has been found that sectional method of shear design is inappropriate for deep beams. The Strut-and-Tie Model (STM) provision of ACI 318-14 produces conservative estimation of capacity compared to simple shear strength model and complicated softened STM. All the models estimated the capacity unconservatively, if overestimation percentage is limited to 5%. © 2018 Czech Technical University in Prague. All rights reserved.