Abstract | As proven by several past earthquakes, the seismic losses associated with nonstructural damage in contemporary buildings are likely to exceed those associated with structural damage by several orders of magnitude. Hence, for assessing satisfactorily the overall seismic performance of a building and consequently the associated losses, it is paramount to properly account for the nonstructural damage via estimating the acceleration and deformation demands that are imposed to its nonstructural elements and contents in any one floor level during an earthquake. Furthermore, being able to better understand the behavior of nonstructural components during a seismic event could have a direct impact on the pertinent design methodologies. To address such issues, we assess the validity of the dominant code/design approaches with reference to the evaluation of the component amplification factor, ap, which is essentially a measure of how much the acceleration of a component is amplified compared to the peak floor acceleration. The state-of-practice in the evaluation of ap is to account only for the component flexibility and period, an approach that essentially caps ap to a maximum value of 2.5. Instead, we investigate the extent to which this factor may be further amplified if we consider the vibration characteristics of the building that contains the component under consideration by employing actual recorded floor motions from instrumented buildings in the United States. At the same time, we evaluate the effect of yielding in the component or its anchorage in offering protection against such amplified acceleration demands.