Near threshold fatigue crack response is extremely sensitive to load history. It is associated with the influence of near-tip stress on instantaneous resistance of crack tip surface layers to failure under atmospheric conditions. The paper deals with computational aspects of stress and strain distributions at the crack tip. A new approach is proposed to obtain near-tip stress under variable amplitude loading. The method considers a combination of standard rules for determining local strains (linear rule, Neuber rule, ESED method, etc.) and well-known in finite element analysis (FEA) return mapping algorithm in context of nonlinear mixed hardening material model. Iterative procedure based on Newton– Raphson method is proposed to calculate plastic variables and near-tip stress at each load step. The calculated results obtained by new model are validated with the traditional approach in case of Al2024-T3 alloy for constant amplitude loading after tensile/compressive overloads.