During the last decade new models for bending stiffness prediction of damaged composite laminates have been proposed in the literature advancing the earlier developed engineering approaches in accuracy and in complexity. However, experimental data for validation of complex analytical or engineering models are almost non-existent in the literature. In the present work a detailed experimental study was performed to investigate the bending stiffness reduction of composite cross-ply laminates with evolving micro-damage. Intralaminar cracks and local delaminations in the bottom surface 90-degree layer of carbon/epoxy and glass/epoxy cross-ply laminates were introduced in 4-point bending tests. Digital Image correlation (DIC) technique was used to experimentally determine the midplane curvature. The accuracy of beam theory for bending stiffness determination was assessed. The measured bending stiffness reduction with respect to transverse crack density was also compared with FEM predictions. The results show that the beam theory gives slightly underestimated curvature at low deflections, whereas at large deflections the beam theory overestimates the curvature and the moment–curvature relation becomes nonlinear. Nevertheless, the overall agreement between beam theory and DIC-based results is still very good, which leads to conclude that beam theory based data reduction schemes have sufficient accuracy for predicting bending stiffness even for highly damaged laminates. © 2022, The Author(s)