Birnbaum and Saunders [11] introduced a positive continuous distribution commonly used in reliability studies. Based on this distribution, we propose and study the called Kummer beta Birnbaum-Saunders distribution for modeling fatigue life data. Various properties of the new distribution including explicit expressions for the moments, generating function, mean deviations, density function of the order statistics and their moments are derived. We investigate maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters. The superiority of the new distribution is illustrated by means of two failure real data sets.