In this study, the tempering effect on the wear characteristics of induction-hardened SPS5 steel was investigated. For this purpose, three tempering conditions were applied to control the hardness of heat-treated SPS5 steel. Ball-on-disk wear tests have been performed using zircornia balls on the tempered specimens to determine the variation of wear characteristics. The results showed that friction coefficient decreased with increasing hardness for induction hardening conditions. This seems to occur because real contact area between specimen and mating ball was affected by the specimen hardness.