The stone columns technique is widely used to improve the load settlement characteristics of soft clay soils. The soil improvements via stone columns are achieved from increasing the load carrying capacity and reducing the settlement. The load settlement characteristics of strip footings supported by stone columns were investigated by applying load to a footing supported on a untreated soil and soil treated with stone columns. Several parameters including spacing, diameter, stiffness of stone columns and undrianed shear strength are studied. A numerical full scale model is carried out on a column of 0.3, 0.5 and 0.6 m in diameter with different length of 8, 10 and 12 m surrounded by very soft to soft clay with different untrained shear strength in the range of 10 to 25 kN/m² .Finite-element analyses have also been performed using 15-noded elements with the software package PLAXIS. The results showed that the adopted stone column can significantly increase the bearing capacity with remarkable reduction on foundation settlement. The ultimate bearing capacity increased by about (1.8) times of without stone column case for the system installed in soft clay cohesion with of 25 kN/m² . It is also found that, the improvement factor depends mainly on column diameter, spacing, length and the shear strength of surrounding clay.