High-energy nickel cobalt manganese oxides have been studied intensively as cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. However, several hurdles need to be overcome to adopt these cathodes in commercial lithium-ion batteries. Herein, aluminum oxide (Al2O3) coating was applied to high-energy nickel cobalt manganese oxides (HE-NCM, Li1.33Ni0.27Co0.13Mn0.60O2+d) by atomic layer deposition (ALD) and its effects on HE-NCM/graphite full cells were investigated. HE-NCM/graphite full cells have better cycling performance and efficiency when HE-NCM is coated with Al2O3. ICP-MS measurements show that the Al2O3 coating can effectively prevent transition metal dissolution from HE-NCM. XPS and FT-IR analysis suggests that the surface film on HE-NCM cathodes does not change significantly with the Al2O3 coating even after 50 cycles, however the surface film on graphite anodes shows a significant change. The resistance of graphite electrodes cycled with the uncoated HE-NCM is higher than that of graphite electrodes cycled with the Al2O3-coated HE-NCM due to the increased SEI thickness. The improved cycling performance of HE-NCM/graphite cells with Al2O3 coating can be attributed to the minimized resistance increase on graphite as well as the suppression of cathode active material loss. (c) The Author(s) 2019. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.