We present a theoretical study of the in-plane valence subband structu
re of unstrained GaAs-AlGaAs, compressively strained InGaAs-AlGaAs and
tensile strained GaAsP-AlGaAs quantum wells grown along the (001), (1
11), (011) and (113) directions. From numerical solution of the 6 x 6
Luttinger k . p hamiltonian we find that confinement energies, warping
and effective in-plane masses strongly depend on the direction of con
finement and on strain. Piezoelectric effects further affect the dispe
rsion for the (111) and (113) directions. Besides, we give analytic ex
pressions for the heavy and light hole in-plane and perpendicular effe
ctive masses for any (hkl) growth direction in the limit of uncoupled
subbands.