A comprehensive review of the use of solid particle erosion in evaluating the durability of coatings is presented. Various measures of coating performance have been proposed in the past. A new and simple method of performing and analysing erosion tests is described, which leads to the description of coating durability in terms of the dose of erodent particles of a particular type and velocity needed to remove the coating. The method has been demonstrated for paint coatings on steel, anodized films on aluminium, physically vapour-deposited titanium nitride coatings on steel and diamond-like carbon films on both steel and a titanium alloy and can provide good discrimination between generically similar coatings of different durability. The method may offer some advantages over the scratch test for evaluating coating durability.