The objective of this work is to study the effect of the surface roughness on the measured hardness. The preparation of the surface roughness level complied with the ISO 1302: 1992 standard. There are many factors influencing surface roughness such as building mac uncry feed rate speed machine settings cutter and water cooling. The surface roughness C.tU. by these factors will have influence on the measured hardness of materials. The SKS3 is used as material in this study. Surface of the work piece was adjusted with different roughness val es divided following four levels: 12-50 urn rough machined 1.6-6.3 urn smooth turned 0.2-0.8 urn and 0.025-0.1 um. Then all the adjusted roughness work pieces were harden. After the Harden process the hardness of all work pieces were 62-64 HRC. From the measured hardness results it was found that the standard deviations are 4.665 1.0310.530 and 0.407 respectively with surface roughness value. Therefore it can be concluded that the standard deviation of hardness increased when the surface roughness increased