Seamless stainless steel tubes (SSST) are used in a wide range of industrial applications. Especially the use in chemical industry, power generation and offshore industry efforts high corrosion resistance and strength of the materials used for the tubes. One of the major steps to manufacture seamless tubes is cold pilgering. This process is an incremental forming process, through which the preliminary tube is formed to the final product over a mandrel. The elongation of the products during pilgering lies in a range of 4 to 7 with corresponding reduction in cross section. Commonly, cold forming of high-alloyed steels requires very high rolling forces. This causes very high local loads on the rolls and the mandrel. Therefore, it is crucial to provide a tool to study and improve the process setup with the aim to increase process robustness and to decrease tool load. Hence, in this work a 3D finite element model of cold pilgering is developed, which is capable of investigating the effects of different roller geometries and mandrel dimensions on the main process outcomes. The simulations are done with the special purpose program simufact.forming. From the process model an improved appreciation concerning tool loads and forming operations during rolling are achieved. Therefore, in this work, the structure of the simulation model, the difficulties encountered and their solutions are explained in more detail. Only with some basic model adaptations it is possible to compute such a complex process in an appropriate computation time and though get appropriate results. This is necessary for expedient use of the developed model for further parameter studies. To validate the model assumptions the results from the simulations are compared with results obtained from rolling experiments. Subsequently, the model developed in this work will be used to optimize the forming process and to improve the tool lifetime in future work.