Railway wheels and axles belong to the most critical components in railway vehicles. The service conditions of railway vehicles became more severe in recent years due to the increase of speed. Therefore, a more precise evaluation of wheelset life and safety has been requested. Wheel/rail contact fatigue and thermal cracks due to braking heat are two main mechanisms of the railway wheel failure. In this paper, an evaluation procedure for the contact fatigue life of railway wheel is proposed. One of the main sources of the contact zone failure is the residual stress. The residual stress on wheel is formed during the manufacturing process which includes a heat treatment, and then is changed by contact stress developed by wheel/rail contact and thermal stress induced by braking. Also, the cyclic stress history for fatigue analysis is determined by applying finite elements analysis for the moving contact load. The objective of this paper is to estimate fatigue life by considering residual stress due to heat treatment, braking and repeated contact load, respectively.