One of the main sources of damage in masonry structures is related to differential settlements, which can be caused by different phenomena, such as tunneling operations, subway construction, underground car parks, soil weakening due to pipe breakage, scouring, etc. The corresponding structural effects need to be computed correctly. Furthermore, such settlements are sometimes unknown and need to be located in order to either correct the underground interventions (for instance in the case of car shelter, tube or gallery construction) or to directly remove their causes (for instance pipe breakage). The influence of the soil on the structural behaviour of the overhead structure is therefore evident. Most of the work on the topic has been developed by uncoupling the soil from the structure, thus, without taking directly into account the soil behaviour’s influence on the building. The soil settlement is usually included as boundary condition, i.e. as constant or variable displacement applied on a restricted foundation line. Furthermore, the real no-tension feature is rarely considered in the masonry model. Based on some experiences of the authors [1–4], the present contribution proposes an approach to investigate the effects of differential settlements on three dimensional masonry structures by explicitly coupling the soil with the structure while still considering as composed of no-tension material. The soil behaviour is included through a boundary integral approach, which avoids mesh discretisation issues.