Kolkata metropolitan city is located on Gangetic basin and the soil of the city is mainly soft, thick alluvial in nature. Kolkata soil has two distinct soil formations, i.e. Normal Kolkata Deposit (NKD) and River Channel Deposit (RCD). The groundwater table (GWT) is situated very close to the ground surface. According to the Indian Seismic code, the city is located in between seismic zone III and IV indicating moderate to high seismicity. Kolkata has experienced various near and far-field earthquakes in the past. Few studies have been performed for ground response analysis of Kolkata soil using linear and equivalent linear approaches. However, soil response under seismic condition is highly nonlinear even at low strain. In this study, 1D effective stress-based nonlinear ground response analysis has been conducted using the finite-element-based program Cyclic1D to predict the site-specific response of both NKD and RCD layered soil deposit under a considered bedrock motion. Three different earthquake motions such as the 1940 Imperial Valley, 2001 Bhuj and 2011 Sikkim having wide variation of strong motion parameters have been considered as input motions for the present analysis. The results show that PGA at the surface of Kolkata city ranges from 0.109 g to 0.119 g for NKD soil and 0.072 g to 0.091 g for RCD soil. The range of variation of peak spectral acceleration for a 5% damping ratio is 0.51–0.67 g for NKD soil and 0.33–0.46 g for RCD soil of Kolkata. The response spectrum curves obtained from the present study are very useful for the earthquake resistance design of structures in the Kolkata region in the absence of site-specific data.