The existence of residual stress in the circumferential butt welded pipes is one of the most important problems concerning stress corrosion cracking in service. In this paper, the residual stress distributions in three kinds of circumferential butt welded pipes were measured by the hole drilling strain gage method and calculation using finite element method is performed and its results are compared with the experiments. At the inner surface of the pipe region near the center line of welding is under high tensile residual stress. However, as the distance from the center line of welding increases, the tensile component decreases and finally becomes compressive residual stress at region far away from the center line of welding. The longitudinal residual stress at the outer surface is compressive regardless of the diameter of pipe and the circumferential stress is changed rom compressive to tensile as pipe diameter increases. The results also demonstrate that the residual stress is mainly caused by self restraint bending force in the pipe welding.