AbstractTwo methods are introduced for the implementation of wall‐stress boundary conditions in variational‐multiscale large‐eddy simulations. In both methods, the boundary conditions are applied weakly using an interior‐penalty approach, where the discretization parameters are determined using information from a wall‐stress model.The performance of the methods is compared with that of hard Dirichlet boundary conditions for turbulent channel flows. A convergence study is performed for the second of the methods, which is found to be the most viable for practical application. Sources of error affecting the convergence study are discussed and quantified. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.