Software cost estimation is a critical task in software projects development. It assists project managers and software engineers to plan and manage their resources. However, developing an accurate cost estimation model for a software project is a challenging process. This paper builds a software cost estimation model using machine learning approach. Different machine learning algorithms are applied to two public datasets to predict the software cost in the early stages. Results show that machine learning methods can be used to predict software cost with a high accuracy rate. © 2019 IEEE.