•New experimental data for AA6201-T81 wires under fretting fatigue.•Nonlocal life estimation approach for wires of overhead conductors.•Effective procedure to obtain the size of the fatigue process zone.•Elastic-plastic contact model significantly improved estimated lives. Fretting fatigue tests were conducted on 6201-T81 aluminum alloy wires of an AAAC 900 MCM conductor. A finite element-based contact model combined with a nonlocal Smith–Watson–Topper criterion was used to estimate fatigue life. To account for the stress gradients beneath the contact, an average stress over a fatigue damage zone was adopted. A procedure for determining the size of the damage zone from V-notched wire test data is presented. Fatigue lives estimated using stresses from a linear elastic contact model were overly conservative, while the use of an elastic-plastic contact model significantly improved the estimates.