A surface-coated cermet cutting tool with a hard coating layer in a high-speed intermittent cutting work is provided. The hard-coating layer includes lower and upper layers. One of the lower layers is a titanium carbonitride layer, which has the highest peak in .SIGMA.3 and a distribution ratio of the .SIGMA.3 to .SIGMA.N+1 ranges 60% to 80% in the atom sharing lattice point distribution graph.