In this paper, an analysis procedure has been presented for cold-formed steel sections, for decomposing the buckling modes obtained using spline finite strip method (SFSM) into their primary and independent buckling modes such as local, distortional and global buckling. This procedure utilizes principles of generalized beam theory (GBT) to evaluate the restraint matrices corresponding to different modes. The restraint matrices are integrated in to spline stiffness matrices using transformation technique to extract pure modes corresponding to local, distortional and global modes. The proposed analysis technique termed as constrained spline finite strip method (cSFSM) has been validated for cold-formed steel open cross-sections subjected to axial compression and bending under various boundary conditions. The results are in agreement with buckling stresses evaluated using constrained finite strip method (cFSM) and GBT. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd