A general formalism is presented to study hot carrier relaxation in the valence band of strained and unstrained semiconductors. The approach is based on a six‐bandk⋅pdescription of the valence band and an anisotropic Monte Carlo method. We show the results of our studies for the Si–Ge system. Carriers are initially injected in the split‐off band and the carrier distribution is followed in time. Results are presented for energy‐dependent energy relaxation time. The relaxation times for Si are about 10−13s while those for Ge are an order of magnitude higher. To study the effect of biaxial strain produced through epitaxy on energy relaxation times we present results for Si0.8Ge0.2on a {100} silicon substrate. This work is of relevance to the interpretation of pump‐probe experiments, which are primarily dependent on the relaxation of the average of the carrier energy. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.