In this region, the dominant deformation mechanism is power law creep, such that the strain rate goes as the stress raised to a stress exponent n. This region is dominated by dislocation creep.  The value of this stress exponent is dependent upon the material and the microstructure. If deformation is occurring by slip, n=1-8, and for grain boundary sliding n=2 or 4.
The general equation for power law creep is as follows, where <math>A_2
 is the applied shear stress, and  is the effective diffusion constant.
Within the power law creep region, there are two subsections corresponding to low temperature power law creep that is dominated by core controlled dislocation motion and high temperature power law creep that is controlled by diffusion in the lattice. Low temperature core diffusion, sometimes called pipe diffusion, occurs because dislocations are more quickly able to diffuse through the pipe-like core of a dislocation. The effective diffusion coefficient in the strain rate equation depends on whether or not the system is dominated by core diffusion or lattice diffusion and can be generalized as follows where   is the volumetric lattice diffusion constant,  is the area corresponding to the dislocation core,  is the diffusion coefficient for the core, and b is the Burger's vector.
In the high temperature region, the effective diffusion constant is simply the volumetric lattice diffusion constant, whereas at low temperatures the diffusion constant is given by the expression . Thus in the high temperature power law creep region, the strain rate goes as , and in the low temperature power law creep region the strain rate goes as .