•Experimentally investigate the effect of Lode angle on fracture strain of steels.•A new specimen type is designed to eliminate the effect of moderate triaxiality.•Asymmetry of the fracture locus with respect to Lode angle parameter is revealed.•The influence of stress triaxiality and yield stress on the Lode angle effect is discussed.•A fracture model is proposed allowing for the effect of both Lode angle and triaxiality. In this paper, the effect of Lode angle on the fracture strain of steels is discussed based on experimental evidence. To isolate the effect of the Lode angle, fracture strains corresponding to stress states with constant stress triaxiality but variable Lode angle parameters are obtained from both the literature and tests performed in this study of newly designed rectangular notched specimens. From investigations of currently available experimental data, it is demonstrated that the fracture strain is significantly affected by the Lode angle, and the influence can be modeled by an exponential function of the Lode angle parameter. This implies that the fracture locus is asymmetric with respect to the Lode angle parameter, whereas many existing fracture models assume it is symmetric. Moreover, the data indicate that the effect of the Lode angle increases with a decreasing value of stress triaxiality and is more pronounced for high strength steels. Having comprehensively evaluated the effect of the Lode angle, a new fracture model termed the Lode angle Modified Void Growth Model (LMVGM) is proposed, which combines the effects of stress triaxiality T, through the Void Growth Exponential Function (VGEF), and the Lode angle parameter ξ, using exponential functions for both. The LMVGM has only three free parameters, α, β and γ, and predicts fracture strain as εf = α∙exp(-β∙T + γ∙ξ), in which β is always positive while γ can be either positive or negative depending on the material. The proposed model is compared to other published models and validated against experimental data, showing good accuracy.