Elevators have an important place in human life just after uprising demands in high rise buildings, skyscraper and luxury residence concepts have surged. Steel wire ropes provide permanent working safety and reliability in the elevator installations. Due to this reason steel wire ropes are one of the vital components of elevators. In this study, effects of discard criteria such as wire breaks, abrasive wear and corrosion where extents of those failures are defined by ISO 4344 standard on the tensile endurance of 6x19 Seale and 8x19 Warrington elevator ropes have been investigated theoretically and experimentally. Tensile endurances of rope samples that have different extents of failure have been determined by using tensile testing machine and comparison is made by undamaged samples for each rope separately. In addition, stress and strain values occurred on the elevator ropes investigated have also been presented. The most critical failure type has been found to be 24 wire breaks for 6x19 Seale rope with fiber core where lifting capacity reduced by 25.99 %. The most critical failure type has been found to be abrasive wear which is 0.1 mm in depth along 100 mm length for 8x19 Warrington rope with independent wire rope core where lifting capacity reduced by 7.93 %.