Buckling is one of the main failure type of slender structures, therefore it is important to get know how delaminations affect the critical buckling loads. In this work orthotropic rectangular plates with trough the-width delamination are modelled using special types of Mindlin plate finite elements. The simulations are verified through experiments. The verification shows that the presented progressive finite element model is able to model the effect of delamination growth on the critical budding load of uni-axial compressed plates. Possible generalization of the results is also presented. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.