The objective of this paper was to study the contribution of shear deformation in reinforced concrete (RC) shear-critical beams. A 2D concrete material model based on smeared fixed crack was presented and incorporated into a commercial finite element (FE) software. A method of calculating shear and flexure deformation separately out of total deformation in the shear span was presented and implemented into the FE analysis. Several experiments of RC shear-critical beams were simulated and good agreement between the experimental and numerical results was obtained in terms of total deformation, flexure deformation, shear deformation and crack patterns. The results show that after shear cracking, the contribution of shear deformation to total deformation increases rapidly. The shear span-to-depth ratio, the longitudinal reinforcement, the shear reinforcement and the load level could be the critical factor to influence the contribution of shear deformation. It appears that for RC shear-critical beams without shear reinforcement, the deformational behaviour is governed by flexure deformation. However, for RC beams with shear reinforcement, the contribution of shear deformation is not negligible after shear cracks develop. Moreover, the measuring method could also affect the measured shear deformation. Finally, future work on experimental investigation into this topic is recommended.