Currently, composite pressure vessels (PVs) are employed in many industries such as aerospace, transportations, medical etc. Basically, the use of PVs in automotive application as a compressed natural gas (CNG) storage cylinder has been growing rapidly. Burst failure due to the laminate failure is the most critical failure mechanism for composite pressure vessels. It is predominantly caused by excessive internal pressure due to an overfilling or an overheating. In order to reduce fabrication difficulties and increase the structural efficiency, researches and studies are conducted continuously towards the proper selection of vessel design parameters. Hence, this paper is focused on the prediction of first ply failure pressure for such vessels utilizing finite element simulation based on Tsai-Wu and maximum stress failure criterions. The effects of laminate stacking sequence and orientation angle on the burst pressure were investigated in this work for a constant layered thickness PV. Two types of winding design, A 90°2/�θ16/90°2 and B 90°2/�θns with different orientations of helical winding reinforcement were analyzed for carbon/epoxy composite material. It was found that laminate A sustained a maximum burst pressure of 55 MPa for a sequence of 90°2/�15°16/90°2 while the laminate B returned a maximum burst pressure of 45 MPa corresponding to a stacking sequence of 90°2/±15°/90°2/±15°/90°2/±15°.... up to 20 layers for a constant vessel thickness. For verification, a comparison was done with the literature under similar conditions of analysis and good agreement was achieved with a maximum difference of 4% and 10% for symmetrical and unsymmetrical layout, respectively. © 2017 Author(s).