The driving force to early-age self-induced cracking is restrained volume changes produced by thermal dilation (TD) and autogenous deformation (AD). Total volume changes of concrete can be easily measured for any given temperature history, but TD and AD are hard to separate because they always occur simultaneously, and this is unsatisfactory from a modelling point of view. The common trend in the literature is to attribute the instantaneous temperature effect to TD and all the remaining free deformation to AD. However, neither a general model nor the maturity principle can be successfully applied to AD under varying temperature history, leaving the separation of TD and AD unsolved. In the current paper, a different separation approach is proposed, in which both the instantaneous and the delayed thermal effects are attributed to TD. Meanwhile, AD is measured or modelled under 20 ℃ isothermal conditions by code-recommended models. The approach is based on a parallelism with the load-induced strain, where the elastic and creep strains are respectively the instantaneous and delayed effect of a load application. According to this parallelism, some properties typical of the mechanical case could be translated to the thermal one. To confirm this, free deformation tests were performed at NTNU on three concrete mixes under varying temperature conditions. The tests showed that the thermal effect on the free deformation is increasingly non-linear with the temperature, and that a temperature increase produces an instantaneous increase of strain followed by a time dependent decrease.