Coupled steel plate shear walls are an extension of the steel plate shear wall (SPSW) system. Limited research and lack of appropriate methodology to analyze and design such system has led to less understanding of the behavior and conservative design requirements. In this paper the conventional elastic design approach for the system is introduced and performance-based plastic design (PBPD) method is developed for seismic design of this system. In order to evaluate the design method, 12 samples of 6 and 12-story structures with 30, 45 and 60 percent coupling and different coupling beam length are designed using this methodology. To evaluate the performance of sample structures a nonlinear static analysis is conducted. Steel plates are modeled with nonlinear orthotropic membrane elements. The results showed that the proposed design method, would lead to further insight into the structural behavior, more control over the design and achieve performance targets.