Lithium‐ion batteries are a key technology for current and future energy storage in mobile and stationary application. In particular, they play an important role in the electrification of mobility and therefore the battery lifetime prediction is a fundamental aspect for successful market introduction. Numerous studies developed ageing models capable of predicting battery life span. Most of the previous works compared the effect of the ageing factors to a battery’s cycle life. These cycles are identical, which is not the case for electric vehicles applications. Indeed, most of the available information is based on results from laboratory testing, under very controlled environments, and using ageing protocols, which may not correctly reflect the actual utilization. For this reason, it is important to link the effect of duty cycles with the ageing of the batteries. This paper proposes a simple method to investigate the effect of the duty cycle on the batteries lifetime through tests performed on different cells for different kinds of cycle. In this way, a generic complex cycle can be seen as a composition of elemental cycles by means of Rainflow procedures. Consequently, the ageing due to any cycle can be estimated starting from the knowledge of simpler cycles.