This paper presents results which advance and improve the usefulness, accuracy and efficiency of incremental centre hole drilling as a method of measuring near surface residual stress fields. Particular emphasis is placed on providing optimal values for the number of drilling step increments to be used and their corresponding size. Guidelines on the optimal values for the number and size of steps to use during measurements are presented for various ratios of hole radius to strain gauge rosette radius in the form of tabulated data. These guidelines are subsequently incorporated into a new data analysis program which permits very near surface residual stress fields to be accurately determined in real components. The benefits of the new approach are highlighted by reporting the results of measurements made on three industrial components, each of which has been subjected to a well-known engineering process. These components are a shot-peened spring-steel, a friction stir welded aluminium alloy, and a titanium alloy subjected to three different machining processes. The results reveal that the improvements to the incremental centre hole drilling technique can provide measured residual stresses from depths ranging from about 10 $$\mu $$ m to 1 mm.