California Building Code (CBC2010) requires that near fault ground motion records should be rotated to the fault-normal and fault-parallel (FN/FP) directions and response history analyses (RHAs) should be performed separately for the ground motions with rotation or not. In the meanwhile, seismic design codes (e.g., ASCE/SEI 7–10) require RHA with ground motion records rotated to the maximum response direction to ensure coverage of the most adverse response. Velocity pulse is the most significant feature that differs near fault ground motions from far-field ground motions, which could impose severe demands on structures in the near-fault region. To investigate the effect of velocity pulse on structural response, this paper rotates near fault ground motion pairs to the direction that has the strongest velocity pulse measured by a maximum pulse indicator (MPI). OpenSees is used for the modeling and dynamic analysis of three dimensional 9-story benchmark steel buildings with ground motions considering the initial records, the FN/FP rotated records, the maximum response rotated records, and the MPI records. The results show that the rotation of records has great effects on structural response and marginal effects on non-structural response.