The tooth profile error is one important individual errors of gear,with wide use of the coordinate measuring machine in gear measurement,the Cartesian coordinate measuring method is becoming more and more widely applied in gear error measurement field. The tooth profile error evaluation method is taken as research subject,the tooth profile error measurement and evaluation methods in the Cartesian coordinate system are systematic researched. The whole process of tooth profile error measurement is introduced,which includes the establishment of gear workpiece coordinate system,tooth profile measurement path planning,and tooth profile error evaluation. The tooth profile error evaluation methods are detailed analyzed and compared,including geometric tooth profile error evaluation method,formula tooth profile error evaluation method and sliding tooth profile error evaluation method,then their algorithm accuracies and efficiencies are compared. The experimental results show that three profile error evaluation algorithms are up to 1 × 10,-14, level in aspect of accuracy. In aspect of measurement efficiency,the geometric profile error evaluation method is the lowest,formula profile error evaluation method is the highest,and efficiency rate is up to 94 times on the condition of 500 000 measurement points. So the formula profile error evaluation method is recommended in the practical application.