In fatigue strength assessment, the methods based on ideal elastic stresses according to Basquin and the less established method based on elastic‐plastic stress quantities according to Manson, Coffin and Morrow are applied. The former calculates loads using linear‐elastic stresses, the latter requires elastic‐plastic evaluation parameters, such as stresses and strains. These can be determined by finite element analysis (FEA) with a linear‐elastic constitutive law, and subsequent conversion to elastic‐plastic loads, using the macro support formula by Neuber. In this contribution, an alternative approach to approximate elastic‐plastic parameters proposed by Glinka is compared to the the strain‐life method using Neuber's formula, as well as the stress‐life method of Basquin. Several component tests on 42CrMoS4‐QT specimens are investigated. To determine the input data for the fatigue strength evaluations, the entire test setup is computed by FEA. The nodal displacements from these validated full‐model simulations are used as boundary conditions for a submodel simulation of a notch, whose results serve as input for the fatigue strength assessments. It is shown that all approaches provide a reliable assessment of components. Our key result is that the strain‐life method using the concept by Glinka for notch stress computation, yields improved results in fatigue strength assessments.