PVD-coated cutting tools show a typical kind of failure in use: cohesive damage, which is believed to be a result of the residual stress state of substrate and coating. As the sin(2)Psi-technique does not give satisfactory information on near surface residual stress trends of coated tools the scattering vector method was applied to determine residual stress depth distributions of coating and substrate. The results are presented and an attempt for an interpretation is given.