Abstract Stainless steel material will become one of the main materials for flexible large-size display substrates. Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) will be one of the most practical processing technologies to achieve super smooth, non-damaged stainless steel surface. In this paper, the effects of different surfactants on material removal rate and surface roughness were studied. The results show that when adding the surfactant of the sodium hexadecyl sulfate in CMP slurry, the MRR was significantly higher than the other two kinds of surfactants. When the content of the sodium hexadecyl sulfate was 0.04wt%, the MRR reached the Maximum. When the content of the sodium hexadecyl sulfate was 0.2 wt%, the surface roughness reached the Minimum. So, the sodium hexadecyl sulfate is selected as the surfactant of the hydrogen peroxide-oxalic acid type CMP slurry.