Abstract This paper studies the applicability of the equivalent material concept developed by the author to the fracture of elastoplastic material due to the presence of U-notches. The approach of equivalent material concept consists of simplifying the study of an elastoplastic material reducing it to the linear elastic case with a maximum stress such as in a tensile test the deformation energy is equal to the real material. This idea combined with the cohesive zone model allows to establish a procedure to predict the failure of U-notched elements. The methodology has been successfully applied to five elastoplastic materials, and in all of them, the level of plasticity regarding the load of plastic collapse has been determined. This analysis verifies the proposed methodology and establish some application limits when the failure occurs within small scale yielding