Ultrasonic NDE is one of important technologies in the life‐time maintenance of nuclear power plant. Ultrasonic inspection system is consisted of the operator, equipment and procedure. The reliability of ultrasonic inspection system is affected by its ability. The performance demonstration round robin was conducted to quantify the capability of ultrasonic inspection for in‐service. The small number of teams who employed procedures that met or exceeded ASME Sec. XI Code requirements detected the piping of nuclear power plant with various cracks to evaluate the capability of detection and sizing. In this paper, the statistical reliability assessment of ultrasonic nondestructive inspection data using Monte Carlo simulation is presented. The results of the probability of detection (POD) analysis using Monte Carlo simulation are compared to these of logistic probability model. In these results, Monte Carlo simulation was found to be very useful to the reliability assessment for the small NDE hit/miss data sets. © 2003 American Institute of Physics