Abstract This paper proposes a new condition indicator (CI) for cost-effective industrial direct current (DC)-powered solenoid valves (SVs). First, a literature review of the failure modes for SVs is reported. The failure regarding the impeded movement of the valve plunger is considered. The proposed CI for this failure mode is computed from only some significant points of the SVs excitation current and their time instants. The proposed CI is evaluated by a large endurance campaign on a set of SVs. Then, a Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation algorithm is proposed and evaluated on the experimental data. Experimental results show the goodness of the proposed CI for RUL estimation of cost-effective industrial DC SVs.