It is known that marine sediments can support both compressional and shear waves. However, published work on scattering from irregular elastic media has not examined the influence of shear on sea bed scattering in detail. A perturbation model previously developed by the authors for joint roughness-volume scattering is used to study the effects of elasticity for three sea bed types: sedimentary rock, sand with high shear speed, and sand with “normal” shear wave speed. Both bistatic and monostatic cases are considered. For sedimentary rock it is found that shear elasticity tends to increase the importance of volume scattering and decrease the importance of roughness scattering relative to the fluid case. Shear effects are shown to be small for sands.