The stress build-up during isothermal cure below the ultimate glass transition temperature of epoxy and acrylate films is investigated in detail. Four systems are studied; two acrylates and two epoxies, with different crosslink densities. Relaxation modulus and film shrinkage are measured simultaneously during cure. The stress build-up is measured independently using a bi-layer beam bending technique. A model for the build-up of cure stresses is proposed, in which stresses are generated by the cure shrinkage and decay by viscoelastic relaxation. The relaxation is described by a simple, modified Maxwell model. Owing to the absence of memory in the Maxwell model, the resulting equation is simple and numerical stress computation straight-forward. The stress build-up over time is thus simulated for the four model systems based on the relaxation and shrinkage data, and the simulations compared with the experimentally observed stress build-up. The model successfully predicts the cure stresses where more standard elastic methods fail. It is found that the amount of stress build-up during cure varies greatly between the different systems. In general, a higher crosslink density results in higher stress build-up. The stress on cure ranged from less than 1% of the total stress on cure and cool-down in a lightly crosslinked epoxy to more than 30% of the total stress in densely crosslinked epoxies and acrylates. Finally simple approximations for estimating the stress levels after cure and cool-down from basic material properties, e.g. modulus and cure shrinkage, are proposed.