The thermal elasto-plastic analysis for the prediction of welding distortion of a 3 dimensional large-scaled ship structure is a very time-consuming work since the analysis is a nonlinear problem, and a lot of finite elements are needed to simulate the large ship hull block. Generally, 3-D finite elements have been used in the 3-D welding distortion problem to assess precisely the temperature gradient through the thickness direction of the welding plate. As a result of the adoption of 3-D element, degrees of freedom are rapidly increased in the problem to be solved. In this study, to improve the time efficiency of welding thermal elasto-plastic analysis, a layered shell element was proposed to simulate 3-D temperature gradient, and the results were compared with the experiment. The experiments were carried out for the type of bead-on-plate welding, and we found the measured data have a good agreement with the FEA results.