In this paper, a fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme is developed for a class of nonlinear sampled-data systems. First, a Euler approximate discrete model is used to describe the plant under the sampling. Under this model, an observer-based fault estimation method is proposed. To guarantee the accuracy of both the state and fault estimation values, the conditions to make the approximate model consistent with the exact model are presented. Then, an active fault-tolerant controller, which has a constraint condition for the sampling time, is designed to make the faulty system stable. Finally, an inverted pendulum is used to show the efficiency of the proposed method. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.