Various seals are widely used to avoid leakage of lubricants and to prevent ingression of foreign particles into the system. It were reported that the heat treated and hard coated sealing surface could be gradually worn out. It is now generally understood that the embedded wear debris or foreign particles within soft seals results in sealing surface abrasion. A great number of studies have done on various contact problems, however, relatively little research has been done on this problem. In this study, a sliding contact problem between a small spherical particle and DLC coated steel surface is analyzed using a nonlinear finite element code MARC. The deformed surface and von-Mises stress distributions are showed for different coating thickness. Surface plastic deformations such as groove and torus show the dominant wear mechanism is abrasive wear. Also the DLC coated sealing surface can be worn down by sub-surface fatigue due to intervening very small foreign and/or wear particles.