Usually in the calculation of valence subband structure for III-V direct bandgap material, axial approximation had been used in the Luttinger-Kohn model to simplify the computational efforts. In this letter, the valence subband structure for the GaInP/AlGaInP strained and lattice-matched quantum wells was calculated without axial approximation, on the basis of 6×6 Luttinger-Kohn Hamiltonian including strain and spin-orbit splitting effects. The numerical simulation results were presented with help of the finite-difference methods. The calculation results with/without axial approximation were compared and the effect of axial approximation on the valence subband structure was discussed in detail. The results indicated that there was a strong warping in the GaInP valence band, and axial approximation can lead to an error when k was not equal to zero, especially for compressively strained and lattice-matched GaInP/AlGaInP quantum wells.