This study proposes a work-based interpretation procedure, hereafter referred to as the IDEA method, for identifying the failure-related transition load in monotonic static load tests of pre-stressed high-strength concrete pipe piles. The method was examined using nine full-scale axial compression tests from a site in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, China. Cumulative work was reconstructed from the measured load settlement curves, and an incremental work response indicator was fitted with a one-break continuous segmented-regression model. The breakpoint was taken as the IDEA estimate, while bootstrap confidence intervals and delta BIC were used to evaluate numerical stability and model support. For the present nine piles, IDEA showed close agreement with the code-interpreted reference loads and yielded the lowest MAPE among the five Q-s interpretation methods considered, whereas the Davisson method showed slightly lower COV and RMSE. Additional perturbation analyses indicated low sensitivity to moderate settlement noise but clear sensitivity to sparse loading records and missing pre-failure points. A preliminary external application to 10 published pile cases showed generally favorable agreement with reference loads reinterpreted from digitized external Q-s curves using a uniform abrupt-settlement criterion. Because the original settlement–time records of the external cases were unavailable, the external assessment is treated as a curve-based transferability check rather than a strictly code-certified validation.