Abstract Powder patterns of samples resulting from ferroelastic phase transitions generally show typical line profiles: asymmetry into the direction of the position of the corresponding hypothetical high symmetry reflection and strongly anisotropic line broadening. An approximate model is presented that describes the characteristic distribution of individual line widths based on the variation of lattice spacings within the domain walls. The variation with temperature is governed by the competition of decreasing spontaneous strain and increasing wall widths and/or wall densities. It is argued that conventional Rietveld refinements can easily lead to erroneous results and a simplified method is proposed to approximate the actual line profiles via the introduction of a second phase with anisotropic strain broadening to take into account the scattering fom the domain walls.