Modal analysis of coupled acoustic-structural systems leads to unsymmetric eigenproblem of special form which introduce different left and right eigenvectors. In this paper, the relation between left and right eigenvectors is first established by symmetrization of the unsymmetric eigensystem, and then Nelson’s method is extended to coupled acoustic-structural systems for calculating the sensitivities of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The method only needs to calculate the sensitivities of the right eigenvectors and can treat the Helmholtz resonance mode naturally. Numerical examples of an acoustic box model solved by the proposed approach are compared with finite difference approach and good agreement is noted.