The production of microalloy steel plates is associated with the combination of heat treatments and hot working known as thermo-mechanical process. Superior mechanical properties of the milled products could be obtained by controlling the microstructural evolution during hot rolling process and accurate identification of phase transformation temperatures. In this paper, the influence of austenitizing time and temperature, cooling rates, banded structure of ferrite and perlite and microalloying element on the phase transformation of austenite in API-X70 steel were investigated. The dilatometry test and microstructure analysis were carried out on the samples with different direction (RD, TD and ND) to the steel plate. The results indicate that increasing of austenitizing time and temperature decrease of the start and the finish temperature of austenite decomposition; this was associated with changing of microstructure from ferrite-perlite to ferrite-bainite. The impact of small changes of cooling rate was found to be insignificant on the phase transformation temperatures. However, by increasing the cooling rate, the microstructure becomes bainitic and the critical temperatures decrease rapidly. Both the dilatometry data and the microstructure micrographs prove that the sample direction has negligible effect on critical temperatures.