The interaction of the reinforcing bars and the surrounding concrete plays an important role in structural concrete as it is decisive for the reinforcing bar anchorage and the load-deformation behaviour, including stiffness and deformation capacity. Therefore, understanding this interaction – commonly known as bond – is highly relevant to a safe and efficient structural concrete design. Bond depends on many parameters, which affect the local reinforcing bar-concrete interface as well as the global load transfer between the reinforcing bars and the surrounding concrete. The latter governs the formation of transverse and longitudinal cracks and the activation of transverse confinement, which are as decisive for bond as the local interface characteristics. Nonetheless, most bond models and code provisions focus on the local interface and merely account for the global configuration by means of empirically calibrated factors accounting, e.g. for good or bad bond conditions in confined or unconfined situations, respectively.This study investigates the potential of stress fields for modelling bond based on the lower-bound theorem of plasticity theory. Stress fields facilitate the investigation of the local interface and the global load transfer consistently in one model, providing valuable insight into the flow of forces. For simplicity, the fundamental case of a concrete tie reinforced with one deformed steel bar is studied in this paper, superimposing axisymmetric discontinuous stress fields originating at each reinforcing bar rib. Each stress field consists of a triaxial nodal zone adjacent to a rib and a conical compression field that spreads the bond force radially, and is equilibrated along its outer perimeter by axial tensile stresses and confining hoops. The model relies on geometric parameters and basic material properties. The validation against experiments on reinforced concrete ties shows a good correlation between the predicted and observed bond strength and the crack spacing. The predictions can be improved by assigning stiffnesses to the stress field components and requiring interface compatibility, i.e. ensuring contact between the concrete and the reinforcing bar at every rib. Even when assuming a simplified, linearly elastic constitutive behaviour for concrete, the consideration of interface compatibility allows for reproducing the steel strain dependency of the local and average bond stresses and the occurrence and impact of splitting cracks.