Abstract: Consolidated undrained triaxial creep tests with a stepwise loading method were carried out on soft clays collected from the coastal area of Tianjin, and by analysing the test data a modified Mesri model was developed. This model takes the final strain in the first stage of creep deformation as an initial strain and describes the deformation in the second stage using the combination of a stress-strain hyperbolic function and strain-time hyperbolic function. It was imbedded into finite element code ABAQUS as a subroutine for soil creep deformation and its calculations were verified by the test data. For further verification, it was applied to simulations of long-term settlement of a soft clay layer in the coastal area of Tianjin. The results show that this modified Mesri creep model fits the test data better than the Mesri model and its calculations can predict the long-term creep deformation characteristics of soft clay layers for engineering projects with a satisfactory accuracy.