Despite several advances in understanding the fatigue process, fatigue failures still happen, which can be attributed to the combined effects of loading and environment. To revalidate the life of an in-service component, a small scoop of a material is extracted from a working component and several miniature specimens are extracted from the limited volume of material. Most available small-specimen test methods pertain to the determination of static properties. The cyclic small punch test is one of the promising methods for estimating fatigue failure life. A small tungsten carbide (WC) spherical ball of ∼ 1.57-mm diameter is placed over a small-thickness (∼0.5 to 1.0 mm) disk-shaped specimen and cyclic load-controlled experiments are carried out until the specimen fractures. Continuous monitoring of local displacement as a function of the number of cycles of fatigue loading provides an insight into fatigue failure. One problem encountered while conducting a cyclic small punch test is in the identification of failure and associated cycles. In this context, acoustic emission sensors were employed in the present work to study online the acoustic signatures as a function of fatigue cycling. Data on the load and extensometer were logged to understand the stiffness degradation during fatigue loading. The load and extensometer data showed hysteresis in response between the loading and unloading segment, and the hysteresis area was found to vary with the number of fatigue cycles. Thus, the hysteresis area can serve as another parameter to characterize the failure of a small disk specimen. The extent of pretorque while clamping the small disk specimen was also investigated with limited samples. A good correlation was observed between failure lives inferred from the hysteresis area, cumulative acoustic signal counts, and cumulative absolute energy. Acoustic emission signature provided a good means to identify failure during small specimen fatigue testing.