It has been well established that resistant force and wear that occur during rolling motion depend on several factors such as material type, hardness, subsurface microstructure, applied load, and speed. The purpose of this work is to investigate the effect of microstructure and the state of deformed layer on the rolling contact characteristics in dry and lubricated rolling contacts. The results of this work show that the rolling resistance behavior depends on the state of the deformed layer. Also, lubrication can reduce the plastic flow at the surface but may still have an effect on the subsurface strain. The cross-sectional view of the microstructure shows that surface traction has a difinite effect on the morphology of the surface region. That is, significant slip seems to have taken place between the ball than those of the dry rolling case. The surface generation effects were significantly less compared to the case of dry rolling contact.