A large number of ground motions are needed in performance‐based earthquake engineering. To date, most existing stochastic models are limited to simulating a single horizontal component of earthquake motions. This study proposes a wavelet‐based stochastic method for jointly simulating three‐component accelerograms using earthquake magnitudes, source‐to‐site distances, and site conditions as input. Based on the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center Next Generation Attenuation (NGA)‐West2 database, prediction equations are developed for wavelet‐packet parameters of two horizontal and one vertical components. Correlations among these components are obtained to jointly simulate three‐component motions based on earthquake scenarios. The simulated ground motions are systematically compared with existing ground‐motion attenuation equations. The model has the capability to simulate the different frequency content of horizontal and vertical motions. The simulated vertical‐to‐horizontal spectral ratios are found to be consistent with observed strong‐motion data. The model is applicable to shallow crustal earthquakes in an active tectonic region with a moment magnitude between 5 and 8, source‐to‐site distance from 0 to 100 km, and shear‐wave velocity in the top 30 m (⁠VS30⁠) in the range of 150–1000 m/s. It can find important applications in 3D time‐history analyses in performance‐based earthquake engineering.

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