Abstract: The local approach is one of the most important methods developed in recent years for fatigue assessment of welded joints.Various local fatigue criteria for fatigue assessment are developed in recent years,such as notch stress intensity factor (N-SIF),equivalent stress intensity factor (E-SIF),critical distance method (CMD) which includes point method (PM),line method (LM) and area method (AM),critical plane method (CPM) and volumetric method (VM).The principles,procedures and effect factors about the local approaches were introduced,the present research situation was reviewed and the existed problems for local approaches were discussed in this paper.