The observation of building damage during strong-motion earthquakes showed that correlation of structural damage with a single parameter such as peak ground acceleration or the total seismic duration is low, while peak ground acceleration is often used as a main seismic parameter to evaluate seismic performance of structures. The main objective of this study is to determine the relationship between several seismic acceleration parameters and the target displacement (TD) of steel frame structures, which is an important parameter to identify performance levels. For this purpose, first, nonlinear analysis is performed on the SAC 3- and 9-story frames subjected to several far-field earthquakes, and then, target displacements and seismic parameters are calculated for each structure. The relationship between the target displacement and seismic parameters is evaluated in the form of correlation coefficient. It is shown that PGA has poor correlation with the target displacement, whereas Housner intensity, spectral pseudo-acceleration, spectral pseudo-velocity and peak ground velocity exhibit strong correlation with TD. The best and the weakest correlation are related to the spectral pseudo-velocity and significant duration of the earthquake, respectively. On the other hand, the parameters directly or indirectly dependent on velocity of earthquake and structure can be proper parameters to reflect demand displacement.