The article is devoted to the testing of cylindrical specimens for tension. The main tendency of tensile tests is the improvement of methods for determining equivalent stresses acting in specimens while deformation localizes in the neck, i.e. methods for determining the hardening curves of materials up to the fracture. The most reliable way to study the rheological properties of materials is the direct measurement of the neck profile, namely the determination of the specimen diameter in the minimum cross-section of the neck and the radius of its curvature. However, direct measurements of the neck are associated with certain difficulties. They include a small number of measurements corresponding to different instants of the test, as well as inaccurate determination of the radius of the neck curvature due to the subjective approach to the measurement process. The measurements become more accurate if you use some equation for the analytical description of the neck profile and perform the measurements using optical methods during the test. However, such processing algorithms are often inaccessible to researchers. In this regard, this work proposes a model for predicting the radius of the neck curvature that is formed during tensile testing the cylindrical specimens. This model relies on the volume conservation law and the analytical description of the neck profile using the one-parameter equation. To calculate the radius of the neck curvature at each instant of the test it is necessary to know only the current values of elongation and the minimum specimen diameter. The effectiveness of the proposed mathematical model is evaluated using the computer simulation. The simulation results show that the use of predicted radius of the neck curvature allows calculating the equivalent stresses close to proper ones without the need of the direct neck profile measurement.