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Abstract The accelerated degradation test (ADT) is an efficient tool for assessing the lifetime information of highly reliable products. However, conducting an ADT is very expensive. Therefore, how to conduct a cost‐constrained ADT plan is a great challenging issue for reliability analysts. By taking the experimental cost into consideration, this paper proposes a semi‐analytical procedure to determine the total sample size, testing stress levels, the measurement frequencies, and the number of measurements (within a degradation path) globally under a class of exponential dispersion degradation models. The proposed method is also extended to determine the global planning of a three‐level compromise plan. The advantage of the proposed method not only provides better design insights for conducting an ADT plan, but also provides an efficient algorithm to obtain a cost‐constrained ADT plan, compared with conventional optimal plans by grid search algorithms.