Bearing performance degradation assessment is meaningful for keeping mechanical reliability and safety. For this purpose, a novel method based on kernel locality preserving projection is proposed in this article. Kernel locality preserving projection extends the traditional locality preserving projection into the non-linear form by using a kernel function and it is more appropriate to explore the non-linear information hidden in the data sets. Considering this point, the kernel locality preserving projection is used to generate a non-linear subspace from the normal bearing data. The test data are then projected onto the subspace to obtain an index for assessing bearing degradation degrees. The degradation index that is expressed in the form of inner product indicates similarity of the normal data and the test data. Validations by using monitoring data from two experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.