Abstract This paper deals with elastic shear buckling behavior of infill panels in sinusoidally corrugated steel plate shear walls, and fitting equations predicting the shear buckling loads are presented. Firstly by using finite element analyses (FEA), the previous formulae for bending rigidities of sinusoidally corrugated plates are revised, then pure shearing model are established to study the effects of key parameters on elastic shear buckling of sinusoidally corrugated infill panels, such as the aspect ratio, corrugation ratio, corrugation depth to plate thickness ratio and corrugation repeating number. Based on extensive FEA numerical results, fitting equations with good accuracy are proposed to estimate elastic shear buckling loads of sinusoidally corrugated panels, which are improved much compared with the solutions in previous studies. It is found that, the formulae for bending rigidities of corrugated plates revised in this paper are accurate compared with the previous ones. For sinusoidal corrugated infill panels, only global buckling and local buckling can be observed in the lowest buckling mode of eigenbuckling analysis, while interaction buckling is not obvious. The parameter of corrugation repeating number has a significant influence on elastic shear buckling loads, whereas it was neglected in previous studies.