The use of dampers is being considered a means to improve the seismic performance of buildings. It may take considerable time and effort to find an optimal design solution since repeated three-dimensional nonlinear time history analyses are required. Therefore, a preliminary design procedure for seismic retrofit using hysteretic dampers was proposed in this study. In the proposed procedure, the amount of retrofit (required number of dampers) is estimated from the capacity curve of the building before retrofit and allowable story drift of the building. In combining the capacity curves of the building and the dampers, the deformation demand for the dampers can be easily checked against their deformation capacity. The equations to transform the device displacement to roof displacement for the combination of capacity curves are developed. The proposed procedure was applied to the seismic retrofit design of sample buildings. The study found that the estimated capacity curve was very close to the actual capacity curve obtained from the pushover analysis, which can determine an appropriate configuration to meet the required seismic performance.