A comprehensive review of through thickness transverse residual stress distributions in a range of as-welded and mechanically bent components made up of a range of steels has been carried out, and simplified generic transverse residual stress profiles for a plate and pipe components have been proposed. The geometries consisted of welded pipe butt joints, T-plate joints, tubular T-joints, tubular Y-joints and a pipe on plate joints as well as cold bent tubes and pipes. The collected data covered a range of engineering steels including ferritic, austenitic, C-Mn and Cr-Mo steels. Measured residual stress data, normalised with respect to the parent material yield stress, has shown a good linear correlation versus the normalised depth of the region containing the residual stress resulting from the welding or cold-bending process. The proposed simplified generic residual stress profiles based on the mean statistical linear fit of all the data provides a reasonably conservative prediction of the stress intensity factors. Whereas the profiles for the assessment procedures are fixed and case specific, the simple bilinear profiles for the residual stresses obtained by shifting the mean and bending stress from the mean regression line have been proposed and validated.