Abstract Recently, the notion of accrual of arguments has received some attention from the argumentation community. Three principles for argument accrual have been identifified as necessary to hold in argumentation frameworks. In this paper we propose an approach to model the accrual of arguments in the context of Defeasible Logic Programming, a logic programming approach to argumentation which has proven to be successful for many real-world applications. We will analyze the above mentioned principles in the context of our proposal, studying other interesting properties