ABSTRACT Even in normally consolidated or lightly overconsolidated clay foundations failures can occur some days/ weeks after the load application is completed. Such an event can sometimes be attributed to creep-like failure. In this paper, the time dependent failure of a homogeneous normally consolidated soft clay foundation has been investigated using soil-water coupled elasto-plastic finite deformation analysis. The inviscid subloading surface Cam-clay model, which can express smooth transition from overconsolidated states to normally consolidated states during reloading, was used for the soil. With drained boundaries a clay foundation can experience failure, instead of consolidation, with the elapse of time after the end of load application. The foundation stays apparently stable for some time until it experiences a sudden failure. The occurrence of such a delayed failure in an elasto-plastic soil foundation is triggered off by the predominant pore water migration over the drainage from the soil mass due to softening that results in the increase of excess pore water pressure under this constant load. With time, the region in the foundation under higher excess pore pressure expands outward progressively from the centerline until failure. The pore pressure increase under constant load is similar to observed cases that registered increase in piezometric heads. When the magnitude of load at the end of construction is comparatively low, i.e. comparatively below the stationary load, only the consolidation process proceeds.