A wide variety of empirical studies that consider transition to nucleate boiling regime has been published so far. Most of them tend to quantify the process-specific heat transfer by means of statistical approximation of the experimental data. The derived relations are therefore valid in a limited range of heat flux and pressure variation. The present work describes a general way to estimate heat transfer coefficient upon the transition to nucleate boiling regime. An expression for the heat transfer coefficient is theoretically derived when the effects of the heating surface roughness are taken into account. This expression is validated against series of experiments on saturated water and liquid nitrogen at the atmospheric pressure. Our theory agrees well with experimental results. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.