The adhesion work of thin film, such as membrane, can be measured by pull-off test. In this kind of experiments, the residual stress in film due to pretension during sample preparation plays an important role in experimental results. Moreover, the effect of residual stress on results vanes greatly depending on different punch shapes The coupling effect of punch shape and residual stress is studied in the framework of plate theory and energy principle. The analytical expressions for the effect parameters are obtained on the basis of the energy criterion From our study, it is found that the effect of residual stress is more significant for a circular punch than the one for a rectangular punch For future pull-off experiments, the coupling effect should be taken into account and the rectangular punch instead of a circular punch should be prioritized in experiments to mitigate the effect of residual stress. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier BV All rights reserved.