Summary The paper investigates the possibility of identifying localised damages for multi-span and multi-floor linear elastic frames using only natural frequencies measured in the undamaged and damaged configurations. Namely, frames of increasing complexity are studied by exploring one by one their significant substructures (i.e. multi-span beams, floor by floor); the error function is defined and minimised on a database of finite element damaged models that only includes the natural frequencies of the local modes of the substructure, that is, the only modes significantly affected by the localised damage considered here. The performances and limits of the procedure are here discussed by means of numerical simulations on steel frames of increasing complexity; a particular attention is also devoted to the role of noise on the identification procedure. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.