Many older reinforced concrete (RC) buildings were constructed and designed with only gravity loads in mind. Columns in those buildings have insufficient reinforcement details that do not satisfy the requirements specified in current seismic design standards. This study aims to develop drift-based fragility functions for lightly RC columns. For this purpose, a database of 193 lightly RC columns was constructed to determine central and dispersion values of drift ratios for individual damage states. Additionally, to develop more accurate fragility functions of the columns, the failure mode of RC columns was incorporated into fragility functions. The classification procedure for column failure mode is proposed in this study. Fragility functions for older RC columns are constructed according to four different damage states. The main variables of the fragility functions proposed in this study are column properties and failure mode.