This study presents an analytical model, calibrated with experimental results, for predicting the effective lateral stiffness of RC circular columns. This study defines effective lateral stiffness as the secant stiffness when the critical column section resists 2/3 of the probable moment strength. The experimental results were obtained from a column database defined after an extensive review of databases existing in the literature. The selected database includes twenty-two circular columns. The proposed model for predicting yield displacement considers sources of lateral displacements from five regions considered in an RC column. In this study, new models for Regions 2 and 3 replace those of Restrepo and Rodriguez (2020), aimed at reaching a more comprehensive and rigorous prediction of the lateral displacements given by the five regions. The proposed effective lateral stiffness of an RC column uses results from this prediction of yield displacement. The ratio of measured effective lateral stiffness values for the column database to predicted effective lateral stiffness using the proposed model had a mean of 1.03, and the coefficient of variation of this ratio was equal to 15.7%. These results show that the proposed model provides an adequate estimate of column lateral stiffness with a smaller coefficient of variations than those found using existing models.