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Abstract Pipelines subjected to thermal or mechanical loads may fail due to plastic strain accumulation which leads to ratcheting. In this research, cyclic plastic behavior and shakedown limit are investigated experimentally and numerically for a defected pressurized pipe under cyclic bending moment. In the numerical model, the combined isotropic/kinematic hardening model based on the Chaboche model is adopted to represent the cyclic plastic flow of the material. The hardening parameters are determined experimentally and used in the finite element (FE) model. A four-point bending test rig is manufactured to test a pressurized API 5L steel pipe under cyclic bending. An elliptical defect is created by machining to depict corrosion pits in pipes. The plastic strains are measured experimentally and the results are used to tune the parameters of the FE model. The shakedown limit of the defected pipe is determined numerically by tracking the critical points behavior and the results are verified experimentally. Furthermore, the plastic work dissipated energy (PWD) is estimated within the defective structure to study the behavior of the pipe. By running this compatible model, it is found that the yield and the shakedown limits are lowered by mean values of 55% and 25% respectively due to the presence of metal loss defect occupying almost half of the pipe thickness.