Heavily cold drawing pearlitic steel wires are widely used for aerospace, tire cord, suspension bridge cable, and architecture due to the high strength with acceptable level of ductility. For marine steel wires, which are widely applied in the marine and offshore structures enduring the effect of stress and corrosion, the corrosion performance is significant. Corrosion is a primary cause of structural deterioration for marine and offshore structures, which results in structural failure, leakage, product loss, environmental pollution and the loss of life. Nu- merous studies have been devoted to the microstructure evolution or cementite dissolution induced by cold drawing. With respect to the effect of microstructure evolution on the performance of pearlitic steel, the views were mainly focused on the mechanical performance, and only a little attention was paid to the effect of microstructure evolution on the corrosion behavior of pearlitic steel. Hence, it is still unclear whether and how the cold drawing influences the corrosion resistance of pearlitic steel. In this work, the effect of microstructure evolution on the pitting corrosion of pearlitic steel was investigated. The electrochemical measurements were carried out by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and potentiodynamic measurement. Meanwhile, the corrosion morphology after immersion for 5 d was observed by standard visual techniques. The results indicate that corrosion resistance of cross section decreases with increasing the strain of cold drawing, while the corrosion resistance of longitudinal section decreases in the first stage of cold drawing (strain epsilon <= 1.2) but increases in the second step of cold drawing (epsilon=1.6). By characterizing the distribution of pits in the evolutionary microstructure induced by cold drawing, the grain boundary, the pearlite colony boundary and the phase boundary where the pits are inclined to initiate and propagation, are sensitive to pitting. Thus, the decrease of corrosion resistance of cross section and longitudinal section in the first stage of cold drawing (epsilon <= 1.2) is due to the multiplication of interface, which increases the pitting sensibility of microstructure. Electron backscattered scattering detection was used to quantify the content oftexture of pearlitic steels with different strains. The result showed that the improvement of corrosion resistance of the longitudinal section in the second stage of cold drawing (epsilon=1.6) is due to the variation of misorientation angle distribution caused by the formation oftexture.