As an effective approach of suppressing vibrations, the constrained layer damping (CLD) has drawn wide attention from automotive and aerospace industries. However, most of the existing investigations focus on the beam structures with CLD and few studies have been done on the plate structures with CLD. Considering the practical applications, this work studies the finite element (FE) modeling of plate structures with CLD by considering the shear and extension strains in all of three layers. To reduce the computational cost and ensure the accuracy, a simplified single-layer equivalent method is originally proposed to model the plate structure with CLD based on the equivalent material properties. In this method, the equivalent material properties are obtained by defining a new equation which includes the equivalent bending stiffness. By nonlinear regression of these responses at resonance frequencies, the equivalent bending stiffness can be obtained and the plate structure with CLD can be regarded as a regular single-layer plate for modeling. The simulation result shows that the proposed simplified single-layer equivalent method using single-layer equivalent material properties is efficient and accurate for modeling plate structures with CLD.