Suitable plies in wind turbine structures are terminated for weight-saving and cost reduction purposes. However, these ply termination locations decrease the strength of the laminated composites. Many researchers are looking for a way to postpone the damage initiation in tapered structures. It is shown that delamination failure can be suppressed when the stress concentrations are reduced at the ply drop location by using the ply scarfing technique, and the ply curving termination method. Some researchers also showed that by enhancing the material properties by impregnating the matrix system with nanoparticles, resistance to crack propagation in a tapered structure can be improved. However, all these methods require a new manufacturing technique or material. Improving the performance of the structure with already existing materials and tools offers design flexibility and rapid implementation in new products. By prescribing different stagger distances between consecutive ply drops, tapered structures with varying taper angles can be obtained as shown in Figure 1. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, in the literature tapered laminates with varying taper angles are not studied and possible benefits are not investigated in detail. Therefore, the effects of the varying stagger distance design on the tapered laminates' loadcarrying capacity are investigated in this study by using 2D parametric finite element models. A python script is developed to generate the detailed parametric models in ABAQUS. Since delamination is the main failure mode in tapered laminates, intraply failures are not considered in the study. Interply damage initiation and propagation are predicted by using zero-thickness cohesive elements. To understand the effects of taper angle and different stagger distances between consecutive ply drops, ply termination alternatives in single and multiple stages are investigated. Results obtained for single-stage ply drop models with different taper angles have shown that while the thin section delamination initiation load decreases as the transition length decreases, the delamination initiation load for the thick section is not affected by the transition length and stays constant. Considering the substantial dependency of the thin section delamination initiation on the tapered geometry, various variable stagger distance models are created for multistage ply termination models by keeping the transition length constant. Results show that the load-carrying capacity of the tapered structure for the same transition length can be improved and thin section delamination initiation load can be postponed by using variable stagger distance between consecutive ply drops.