An adequate representation of the relationship between effective rainfall and rainfall losses is required in hydrological rainfall–runoff models to reduce the uncertainty of the modelling results. This study evaluates the performance of several hydrological rainfall loss methods using the experimental data obtained from a laboratory small-scale physical landslide model with variable slope inclination, homogenous material and no vegetation effects. Three different experiments were selected and five rainfall loss methods were tested to evaluate their performance in reproducing the experimental results from the perspective of the surface runoff formation on the experimental slope. Initial and calibrated parameters were used to test the performance of these hydrological rainfall loss methods. The results indicate that the initial parameters of the rainfall loss model can satisfactorily reproduce the experimental results in some cases. Despite the fact that the slope material characteristics used in the laboratory experiments were relatively homogenous, some well-known methods yielded inaccurate results. Hence, calibration of the rainfall loss model proved to be essential. It should also be noted that, in some cases, the calibrated model parameters were relatively different from the initial model parameters estimated from the literature. None of the tested hydrological rainfall loss methods proved to be superior to the others. Therefore, in the case of natural environments with heterogeneous soil characteristics, multiple rainfall loss methods should be tested and the most suitable method should be selected only after cross-validation or a similar evaluation of the tested methods.