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Civil infrastructure assets, such as roads, locks, bridges, treatment plants and storm surge barriers, are often characterised by long service lives and corresponding technical life cycles. When life cycles are long, the time value of money plays a role in asset management decision-making on capital investments and operation and maintenance expenditures. In this paper, a new life cycle costing (LCC) approach for discounting in two classes of maintenance optimisation models is developed. These models are the age replacement model and the interval replacement model. Three well-known LCC techniques, which are the present worth, the capital recovery and the capitalised equivalent worth, are combined and used to develop a stepwise methodology. This methodology is validated with the few case-specific mathematical equations that exist in the literature. The advantage of using this alternative LCC approach is its applicability and flexibility for reliability and maintenance engineers. The resulting LCC method builds on well-known LCC formula and enhances the understanding of the inclusion of discounting principles in reliability models. Understanding these principles makes the method flexible. Practitioners can extend or adapt the method to changing circumstances, such as additional cash flows and altering reliability modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]