Due to the over-increasing demand for land space of increased construction activity worldwide, there is increasing needs to improve soft soil grounds which otherwise are unsuitable for adopting the conventional shallow foundations. Ground improvement technique is a potential alternative to mitigate this problem. Many techniques, such as stone columns are effective means of performance improvement of foundations on soft soil. Stone columns develop their load carrying capacity from the circumferential confinement provided by the surrounding soils. In very soft soils, an important problem which should be taken into account for designing stone column is bulging as the circumferential confinement offered by the surrounding soft soil may not be sufficient to develop the required load carrying capacity. Hence confinement by geosynthetics would yield a better result and prevents squeezing of stones into the surrounding clay. The load carrying capacity is further increased and settlement is decreased with the addition of a sand bed over the stone columns, also this layer of sand is used to let the foundation distribute its load uniformly. In the current research, a series of numerical model tests on an unreinforced sand bed (USB) placed over encased stone column (ESC) floating in soft clay. The scope of this study is to investigate the effect of thickness (t), properties of sand bed and undrained cohesion of soft soil (Cu) on the bearing capacity of footing rested on sand bed over soft soil with geosynthetic-encased stone columns. Three dimensional finite difference numerical models were performed using a finite difference package FLAC3D.