Duty cycle is determined as the ratio of operating time to total time. Duty cycle in reliability prediction is one of the significant factors to be considered. In duty cycle application, non-operating time failure rate has been easily ignored even though the failure rate in non-operating period has not been proved to be small enough. Ignorance of non-operating time failure rate can result in over-estimated system reliability calculation. Furthermore, utilization of duty cycle in reliability prediction has not been evaluated in its effectiveness. In order to address these problems, two reliability models, such as MIL-HDBK-217F and RIAC-HDBK-217Plus, were used to analyze non-operating time failure rate. This research has proved that applying duty cycle in 217F model is not reasonable by the quantitative comparison and analysis.