Coatings are routinely employed by industry to improve product appearance, protect substrate, augment adhesion to other layers or to functionalise them for further reactions. Sometimes it may be necessary to determine the coating characteristics in order to understand the mechanism of failure or improve coating performance when the coating does not meet the performance specifications. Surface analytical techniques are commonly employed for this purpose. Surface analytical techniques such as SEM/EDX, XPS or ESCA, SIMS and AFM, can yield useful information about coating composition, chemistry, thickness, surface morphology, and coating continuity. In this paper, the application of these techniques to the analysis of coatings will be discussed and several case studies will be presented.