Mechanical clinching is an ef- ficient join- ing tech- nique fre- quently used in the au- tomotive industry to join sub- assemblies of the car body. Dur- ing me- chanical clinching, the ma- terial in the joint is cold worked altering the cyclic material proper- ties and affecting the per- formance of the joint under cyclic loading. The pa- per presents an approach for fatigue life es- timation of clinched joints us- ing the Local Strain Approach. Numer- ical sim- ulation is utilized to retrieve local stresses and strains in the crit- ical re- gion. Ex- perimen- tal inves- tigation is presented to vali- date the crack ini- tiation lo- cation and an assess- ment of the fa- tigue life estima- tion is car- ried out.