A research on the stable fatigue crack propagation of 16MnR steel is investigated sys-tematically in this paper. First, control experiments of 16MnR with compact tension specimen is conducted to study the effect of R-ratios, specimen thickness and notch sizes. The experiments show that the fatigue crack growth (FCG) rate in stable propagation was insensitive to these factors. Then, the stress intensity factor (SIF) is computed and compared by displacement interpolation method, J integral and interaction integral method respectively. The simulation shows that optimiz-ation on the mesh density and the angle of singular element improved the computational efficiency and accuracy of SIF and the interaction integral method has an obvious advantage on stability. Fi-nally, the FCG rate is modeled by the Jiang fatigue damage criterion and the extended finite ele-ment method (XFEM) respectively. The simulation results of FCG rate are in line with experi-ments data and indicate that XFEM method is more accurate than Jiang fatigue damage method.