A critical technological roadblock to the widespread adoption of proton-exchange membrane fuel cells is the development of highly active and durable platinum-based catalysts for accelerating the sluggish oxygen reduction reaction, which has largely relied on anecdotal discoveries so far. While the oxygen binding energy ∆E₀ has been frequently used as a theoretical descriptor for predicting the activity, there is no known descriptor for predicting durability. Here we developed a binary experimental descriptor that captures both the strain and Pt transition metal coupling contributions through X-ray absorption spectroscopy and directly correlated the binary experimental descriptor with the calculated ∆EO of the catalyst surface. This leads to an experimentally validated Sabatier plot to predict both the catalytic activity and stability for a wide range of Pt-alloy oxygen reduction reaction catalysts. Based on the binary experimental descriptor, we further designed an oxygen reduction reaction catalyst wherein high activity and stability are simultaneously achieved. ; © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022. Received 12 July 2021; Accepted 26 April 2022; Published 09 June 2022. Y.H., Q.J., W.A.G. and X.D. gratefully acknowledge the support of the Office of Naval Research (award N000141812155). The XAS data were collected at beamlines 6-BM, 7-BM and 8-ID of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a US Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated for the Department of Energy Office of Science by Brookhaven National Laboratory under contract no. DE-SC0012704. We acknowledge the use of facilities and instrumentation at the University of California Irvine Materials Research Institute, supported in part by the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center programme through the University of California Irvine Center for Complex and Active Materials (DMR-2011967). We also thank the Electron Imaging Center of Nanomachines at the ...