Abstract Tool steels are well known to have superior strength and are claimed to have superior wear resistance than conventional steels in several scenarios. However, their behavior under slurry erosion conditions have been seldom studied. To this end, a set of tool steels, primarily from the CPM yV (y = 1, 3, 9, 10, 15) alloy family, was selected to understand the effect of hardness and vanadium carbide content on the slurry jet erosion (SJE) performance at different impingement angles. It was observed that the SJE resistance increases with the increase in the vanadium carbide volume fraction, but is independent of alloy hardness.