Abstract In metal single crystals, the observed formation of deformation banding pattern has been explained by greater latent hardening of slip systems than their self-hardening, which promotes spatial segregation of plastic slips and lamination towards single-slip domains. Numerical studies focusing on the formation of deformation bands usually involved initial imperfections, boundary-induced heterogeneity, or the postulate of minimal global energy expenditure which additionally promoted non-uniformity of deformation. This article analyses the case when no such mechanism enforcing locally non-uniform deformation is implemented in the finite element (FE) method, while the global system of equations of incremental equilibrium is solved in a standard way. The new finding in this paper is that the deformation banding pattern can appear spontaneously in FE simulations of homogeneous single crystals even in the absence of any mechanism favouring deformation banding in the numerical code. This has been demonstrated in several examples in the small strain formalism using a plane-strain model in which the twelve fcc slip systems are reduced to three effective plastic slip mechanisms. Incremental slips are determined at the Gauss-point level either by incremental work minimization in the rate-independent case or by rate-dependent regularization. In the rate-independent approach, the trust-region algorithm is developed for the selection of active slip systems with the help of the augmented Lagrangian method. Conditions under which a banding pattern appears spontaneously or is suppressed are discussed. In particular, a critical rate sensitivity exponent is identified.