This paper is concerned with the convergence characteristics and application of the Rayleigh-Ritz based substructure synthesis method to structures for which the use of a kinematical procedure taking into account all the compatibility conditions, is not possible. It is demonstrated that the synthesis in this case is characterized by the fact that the mass and stiffness matrices have the embedding property. Consequently, the estimated eigenvalues comply with the inclusion principle, which in turn can be utilized to prove convergence of the approximate solution. The method is applied to a frame and is compared with the finite element method. © 2000 by ASME.