The roughness of rock joint is one of the most important parameters in developing the shear resistance and the tendency of dilation. Due to the damage accumulated with shearing displacement, the roughness angle is lowered continuously. It is known that dilation, shear strength hardening, and softening are directly related to the degradation of asperities. Much effort has been directed to incorporate the complicated damage mechanism of asperities into a constitutive model fur rock joints. This study presents an elasto-plastic formulation of joint behavior including elastic deformability, dilatancy and asperity surface damage. It is postulated that the plastic portion of incremental displacement 7an be decomposed into contributions from both sliding along the asperity surface and damage of asperity. Numerical cyclic shear tests are presented to illustrate th? performance of the derived incremental stress-displacement relation. A laboratory cyclic shear test is also simulated. Numerical examples reveal that the elasto-plastic joints model is promising.