The study is devoted to the determination of the effective material properties of masonry based on its internal structure. Masonry is considered as a periodic composite consisting of bricks and mortar. According to the classical method of determining effective moduli for composites, in order to describe internal microstructure we consider a representative volume cell, which enables us to determine effective properties of an equivalent anisotropic material. The problem for the representative volume cell is simulated and analyzed using finite element method. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.