The planned material volume to be removed from a blank to create the final shape of a part is commonly referred to as allowance. Determination of machining allowance is essential and has a great impact on productivity. The objective of the present work is to use a case study to investigate how a prior rough milling operation affects the finish machined surface and, after that, to use this knowledge to design a methodology for how to assess the machining allowance for subsequent milling operations based on residual stresses. Subsequent milling operations were performed to study the final surface integrity across a milled slot. This was done by rough ceramic milling followed by finish milling in seven subsequent steps. The results show that the up-, centre and down-milling induce different stresses and impact depths. Employing the developed methodology, the depth where the directional influence of the milling process diminishes has been shown to be a suitable minimum limit for the allowance. At this depth, the plastic flow causing severe deformation is not present anymore. It was shown that the centre of the milled slot has the deepest impact depth of 500 mu m, up-milling caused an intermediate impact depth of 400 mu m followed by down milling with an impact depth of 300 mu m. With merged envelope profiles, it was shown that the effects from rough ceramic milling are gone after 3 finish milling passes, with a total depth of cut of 150 mu m.