Apparent mechanical properties in structural components can be different from the initially designed values due to the formation of the residual stress in metal forming and welding. Therefore, the evaluation of residual stress has great importance in the reliability diagnosis of structural components. A nondestructive instrumented indentation technique has been proposed to evaluate various strength concerning mechanical properties from the analysis of load-depth curve. In this study, quantitative residual stress estimation on API X65 welded joints for natural gas pipeline was performed by analyzing the variation of indentation loading curve by residual stress through a new proposed theoretical model. The residual stress from the indentation method was compared with that from the saw-cutting method.