This paper presents a two-surface plasticity model for describing some important features of saturated clay under cyclic loading conditions, such as closed hysteresis loops, cyclic shakedown and degradation, and different stress–strain relations for two-way loading. The model, namely ACC-2-C, is based on the elastoplastic model ACC-2 (an adapted Modified Cam Clay model with two yield surfaces) developed by Hong et al. (Acta Geotech 11(4):871–885, 2015). The small-strain nonlinearity concept is adopted to achieve the nonlinear characteristics of clay during unloading–loading stage. The new hardening law related to accumulated deviatoric plastic strain is proposed for the inner surface to describe the cyclic shakedown and degradation. Following the advantages of the ACC-2 model, the constitutive equations are simply formulated based on the consistency condition for the inner yield surface. The model is conveniently implemented in a finite element code using a stress integration scheme similar to the Modified Cam Clay model. The simulation results are highly consistent with experimental data from drained and undrained isotropic cyclic triaxial tests in normally consolidated saturated clay under both one-way and two-way loadings.