An effective stress principle for saturated fractured porous media is proposed based on the double-porosity representation. Both the solid grains and the fractured porous medium are assumed to be linearly elastic materials. The derivation employs volume averaging technique to obtain macroscopic scale expressions. Two parameters, the bulk modulus of the fractured medium and bulk modulus of the porous matrix, are introduced in the formulation. The final expression reduces to the one obtained by Biot and Willis <1957>, Skempton <1960>, Nur and Byeerle <1971>, and Verruijt <1984> when the volume fraction of the fractures vanishes, that is, for a nonfractured porous medium. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995