This paper presents a study of residual stress in cold drawn wires of low carbon steel by means of FEM simulation and X-ray diffraction. First, FEM simulations were performed to simulate the wire drawing process and calculate residual stresses. Due to the initial texture in the original material, a texture based anisotropic yield locus was incorporated into the model to take the plastic anisotropy into account. Next, X-ray diffraction measurements were carried out at the surface of the wire to obtain the distribution of the lattice spacing versus sin(2)psi, from which the macroscopic residual stresses at the wire surface were calculated. The comparison between the results from the simulations and the measurements shows that a good agreement has been reached.