The piled raft foundation is based on a skillful geotechnical concept wherein the pile group does not have any accountability for the safety and stability of the structure but performs the role of settlement reducer. In the design of piled raft, the capacity of the overall foundation system gains more importance than the capacity of individual constituting elements. Hence it becomes necessary to establish the limiting capacity of the piled raft so that the factor of safety for the overall system stability requirements can be assessed. The paper presents the details of the work done to establish a procedure to fix the limiting capacity of the piled raft based small scale 1 g model tests and an independent numerical study.