The application of laminated fiberous composite materials is increasing in many structures such as shell and plates especially related to applications in airospace engineering. In this paper, the three-dimensional stress distribution in an cross-ply laminated composite cylindrical shell subjected to radial loading is investigated. The formulation is based on a layer-wise, displacement-based theory. First, the displacement and strain field of a cylindrical shell is derived within the framework of the layer-wise theory. Then, by employing the principle of minimum total potential energy, the governing equations of motion and the corresponding boundary conditions for the cross-ply laminated composite cylindrical shell are obtained. An analytical solution is subsequently developed for the governing equations, and the edge boundary conditions are applied to the solution. In the numerical results section, the convergence and accuracy of obtained numerical results are examined with available results in the literature, and stress distributions in a cross-ply composite cylindrical shell which is subjected to lateral loading are computed, and various results corresponding to different loading distributions are presented., the effect of various parameter and the numerical results are investigated.