High temperature oxidation of metals leads to residual stresses both in the metal and in the growing oxide. In this work, the evolution of this residual stresses is theoretically predicted in the growing oxide layers. The origin of these stresses is based on a microstructural model. Using experimental results providing from the oxidation kinetics, and an analysis proposed to describe the growth strain occurring in the thin layers, a set of equations is established allowing determining the stresses evolution with oxidation time. Then, the model is compared with experimental results obtained on both alpha-Fe and phosphated alpha-Fe, oxidised at different temperatures. Numerical data are extracted from experiments either with an asymptotic formulation or with an inverse method. These two methods give good agreement with experiments and allow extracting the model parameters. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.