Structural integrity and life of welded joints made of a micro-alloyed low-carbon fine-grained normalised high strength pressure vessel steel, P460NL1 is presented [1]. The researach performed within the scope of this topic involved a large number of experiments, including tensile and bending tests, hardness and toughness, as well as metallography and fractography tests, in order to determine the mechanical properties of the materials and the welded joints in detail, along with their microstructures and their influence on the obtained test results. Specimens cut out of a welded plate with dimensions of 500x500x14 mm were used for the experiments, whereas certain tests required the making of notches in the specimens, inside the heat affected zone, and this welded joint region was the focus of the research. Fatigue experimental tests were based on the assumption that fatigue crack growth rate changes depending on the regions through which the crack passed during its propagation. For this purpose, specimens used in toughness and fatigue tests were divided into four groups, depending on the part of the plate from which they were taken. Numerical calculations were performed using the extended finite element method (XFEM) [2]. Simulations were based on the experimentally determined values of Paris law coefficients, C i m [3-5], for every region through which the crack propagated during each test. Obtained results have indicated good agreement with the experimental ones, which verified the application of extended finite element method in this case.