Abstract Considering the effects of the Coriolis and centrifugal accelerations and the initial hoop tension, this paper studies the influences of boundary conditions on the frequency characteristics of a rotating truncated circular multi-layered conical shell. The present study is based on the Love first approximation theory and Galerkin procedure. The obtained results include the relations of the frequency parameter, circumferential wave number and rotating velocity for different cone angles and boundary conditions. Variation of frequency characteristics is also discussed for different vibrational modes. In order to validate the present analysis, several numerical comparisons are made with those published in open literature and they show very good agreement.