Since the execution of structural design by professional structural engineers is not mandatory for small-size buildings in Korea, structuraldesign is conducted by architects or contractors resulting in concern about the seismic safety of the buildings. Therefore, the KoreanStructural Engineers Association proposed dedicated structural design criteria in 2012. The criteria were developed based on adeterministic approach in which the structural members are designed only with information of story and span length of the buildings andwithout structural analyses. However, due to the short time devoted to their development, these criteria miss satisfactory basis and do notdeal with structural walls popularly used in Korea. Accordingly, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport launched a research onthe ‘development of structural performance enhancement technologies for small-size buildings against earthquakes and climatechanges’.. As part of this research, this paper intends to establish direction for the preparation of deterministic structural design guidelinesfor seismic safety of domestic small-size reinforced concrete buildings. To that goal, a typical plan of these buildings is selectedconsidering frames only and frames plus walls, and then design is conducted by changing the number of stories and span length. Next, theseismic performance is analyzed by nonlinear static pushover analysis. The results show that the structural design guidelines should bedeveloped by classifying frames only and frames plus walls. The size and reinforcement of structural elements should be provided in themiddle level of the current Korean Building Code and criteria for small buildings by considering story and span length for buildings withframes only, and determined by considering the shape and location of walls and the story and span length as well for buildings with framesplus walls. It is recommended that the design of walls should be conducted by reducing the amount of walls along with symmetricallylocated walls.