Reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls resist lateral loads in a building due to wind and earthquake, in addition to gravity loads. Each rectangular shear wall segment (sometimes provided with ‘boundary elements’ at the ends) is required to be designed to resist axial compression (P) combined with in-plane bending moment (M). This paper provides closed-form expressions for generating the full P-M interaction curve for the design and analysis of shear walls with and without boundary elements, which has been validated with SAP. It also gives normalised load/moment expressions for generating design charts, similar to SP 16 charts for RC columns. The simplified method given in IS 13920 is applicable only for rectangular shear walls with uniformly distributed main reinforcements. The proposed method provides a more accurate and economical solution than the simplified method given in IS 13920. © 2019, Associated Cement Companies Ltd.. All rights reserved.