Building a cross-industry database of pipe failure is an effective method to improve the evaluation accuracy of pipe failure rate. Although pipes have many common failure mechanisms, they are used in many different environments in each industry. Thus, to enable practical use of a cross-industry database, it is desirable to develop a method for evaluating pipe failure rate that is capable of modeling the variability between different industries. The hierarchical Bayes model is one method that can model the variability between different data sources. In this paper, a method for evaluating the pipe failure rate for one industry is developed based on the hierarchical Bayes model. Even when the database contains small number of failure records, this proposed method is always capable of utilizing those records to evaluate the failure rate for a specific industry. Using the proposed method in conjunction with a cross-industry pipe-failure database, the pipe-failure rate was evaluated to a greater accuracy than that obtained using the conventional Bayes method.