A method for determining residual stress in a selectively hardened parts including an unhardened region adjacent to a hardened region is provided. The method includes obtaining a Barkhausen Noise (BN) value for the unhardened region and selecting a corresponding absolute residual stress value from a correlation between BN values and absolute residual stress values. The selected absolute residual stress value accurately estimates the absolute residual stress in the hardened region of the selectively hardened part. In variations of the method the unhardened region is surrounded by the hardened region, the hardened region is a laser hardened region and the unhardened region is not laser hardened.