For the purpose of clarifying the influence of welding residual stress to the fatigue crack propagations behaviour, an analytical investigation based on finite element method is performed to examine the opening behaviour of tip-closed crack in the compressive residual stress. A finite element model comprised of contact elements for the crack plane and plane stress elements for the base material is used to evaluate crack opening stress of the crack existing in the residual stress field. Also an analytical method based on the superposition principle to estimate the length of opened part of tip closed crack and the stress distribution adjacent to the crack during uploading is applied to the finite element model. The software for the analysis is ABAQUS, which is a general purpose finite element package. The results show that stresses distributed on the crack surfaces are reduced and approached to zero as the applied stresses are increased up to crack tip opening stress and no mechanical discontinuity is found at the boundary of contact elements and plane stress elements. It is verified that the opening behavior of the fatigue crack in the residual stress can be predicted by finite element method with the proposed analytical method.