Fretting fatigue generally leads to the degradation of the fatigue strength of a material due to cyclic micro-slip between two contacting materials. Fretting fatigue is regarded as an important issue in designing aerospace structures. While many studies have evaluated fretting fatigue behavior under elastic deformation conditions, few have focused on fretting fatigue behavior under elastic-plastic deformation conditions, especially the crack orientation and fatigue life prediction for Ti-6Al-4V. The primary goal of this study was to characterize the fretting fatigue crack initiation behavior in the presence of plasticity. Experimental tests were performed using pad configurations involving elastic-plastic deformations. To calculate stress distributions under elastic-plastic fretting fatigue conditions, FEA was also performed. Several parametric approaches were used to predict fretting fatigue life along with stress distribution resulting from FEA. However, those parameters using surface stresses were unable to establish an equivalence between elastic fretting fatigue data and elastic-plastic fretting fatigue data. Based on this observation, the critical distance methods, which are commonly used in notch analysis, were applied to the fretting fatigue problem. In conclusion, the effective strain range method when used in conjunction with the SMSSR parameter showed a good correlation of data points between the pad configurations involving elastic and elastic plastic deformations.