Functionally graded materials (FGMs) are the potential candidates under consideration for designing thefirst wall of fusion reactors with a view to make best use of potential properties of available materialsunder severe thermo-mechanical loading conditions. A higher order shear and normal deformations platetheory is employed for stress and free vibration analyses of functionally graded (FG) elastic, rectangular,and simply (diaphragm) supported plates. Although FGMs are highly heterogeneous in nature, they aregenerally idealized as continua with mechanical properties changing smoothly with respect to spatialcoordinates. The material properties of FG plates are assumed here to vary through thickness of plate ina continuous manner. Young’s modulii and material densities are considered to be varying continuouslyin thickness direction according to volume fraction of constituents which are mathematically modeledhere as exponential and power law functions. The effects of variation of material properties in terms ofmaterial gradation index on deformations, stresses and natural frequency of FG plates are investigated.The accuracy of present numerical solutions has been established with respect to exact three-dimensional(3D) elasticity solutions and the other models’ solutions available in literature.