A study is made on the characterization of damage tolerance by spherical indentation in hardly coated layer structure with modest elastic modulus mismatch. A hard silicon nitride is prepared for the coating material and silicon nitride with 5wt% of boron nitride composites for underlayer. Hot pressing to eliminate the effect of interface delamination during the fracture makes strong interfacial bonding. The elastic modulus mismatch between the layers is not only large enough to suppress the surface crack initiation from the coating layer but sufficiently small to prevent the initiation of radial crack from the interface. The strength degradation of the layer structure after sphere contact indentation does not significantly occur, while the degradation of silicon nitride-boron nitride composite is critical at a high load and high number of contacts.