Pile group is widely used as a form of deep foundation to support various upper structures, e.g.the sky-scraper, oil platform and larger-span bridges, which require highaccuracy control on settlement.Unfortunately, the ground is composed by heterogeneous soils, which normally makes the calculation of settlement complicated for design.However, in the case that the ground is formed through the process of the sedimentation, it is reasonable to homogenize the ground as multi-layered homogenous soils.In this paper, a simple semianalytical method is proposed to calculate the nonlinear settlement of pile group based on load-transfer approach.The pile is assumed to be elastic, while the pile-soil interaction is simplified as continuous Masing-Iwan model reflecting dissipative nature of natural soils.Thus the load-transfer function for single pile is obtained.The pile-soil-pile interaction is considered simply by modifying the load-transfer function of single pile by incorporating the contribution of settlement from other piles in group.Therefore, the governing equation of the pile group is decoupled and the pile group can be solved as single pile separately.Welldocumented field tests are used to validate the method, and results predicted by this method agree well with that from field tests.