An innovative critical plane determination approach with weight-averaged largest fatigue damage is proposed, in which the material failure modes can be considered. If material exhibits shear cracking behavior, a strain-based critical plane model with shear failure mode is selected to evaluate the weight function. Otherwise, other one with tensile failure mode is adopted. According to the proposed critical plane, a multiaxial fatigue lifetime estimation methodology is established for evaluating fatigue life. And, six kinds of mate-rials are employed to validate the validity of presented methodology. The validation results reveal the presented methodology can estimate the orientation angles of failure plane accurately and supply satisfactory fatigue lifetime estimations for both shear and tensile failure mode materials. Furthermore, the proposed critical plane framework can be extended to be utilized with stress-based fatigue criteria, and prediction results show a good agreement with experimental data by another two materials.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CCBY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).