We consider incremental problem arising in elasto-plastic models with isotropic hardening. Our goal is to derive computable and guaranteed bounds of the difference between the exact solution and any function in the admissible (energy) class of the problem considered. Such estimates are obtained by an advanced version of the variational approach earlier used for linear boundary-value problems and nonlinear variational problems with convex functionals [24, 30]. They do no contain mesh-dependent constants...