Various base isolation schemes have been implemented to isolate a structure from intense base excitations. In this paper, performance of a friction sliding bearing with nonlinear restoring mechanism is studied on a three-storey steel moment-resisting frame building under varying seismic hazard conditions. The performance of the proposed system is compared with that of the fixed-base and with only the friction sliding bearing. For this purpose, the effectiveness of the proposed isolation system is evaluated in terms of the residual displacement, peak inter-storey drift and the maximum base displacement. It is envisioned that a system as proposed here, if optimized for a target hazard situation, will result in a cost-effective solution. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.