In this paper, we study the shape preserving interpolation for positive data using a rational quartic spline which has a quartic numerator and linear denominator. The rational quartic splines have GC1 continuity at join knots. Simple data dependent constraints are derived on the shape parameters in the description of the rational interpolant. Numerical comparison between the proposed scheme and the existing scheme is discussed. The results indicate that the proposed scheme works well for all tested data sets. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.