The increasing demand for high performance gears promotes the study of application of new materials, such as microalloyed steels that appear as an alternative with economic potential to some of the steels currently used in gears. Gear manufacturing chain involves a sequence of processes with thermal and/or mechanical loading that alters the equilibrium state of the material. The influence of each process can be identified even at the end of the chain, which requires an understanding of each individualized process. In this scenario, the study herein presented has the objective of characterizing the surface integrity evolution of niobium and titanium microalloyed steels along a conventional gear manufacturing chain. The addition of microalloying elements in steels usually applied for gears is evaluated both holistically considering the entire manufacturing chain and individually for each manufacturing process. Investigations are conducted to understand how processes impact the surface integrity of microalloyed steels in terms of grain size, residual stress state, topography, and distortion level. The results herein obtained show that the addition of microalloying elements induces a microstructure with refined grain structure after the processes with thermal loading. The combined addition of niobium and titanium also indicated an increase in grain size homogeneity. The benefits of the new alloys are observed in the residual stress state and in the topography, in which they present higher levels of compressive residual stress combined with a surface with reduced roughness. The results also indicate a reduction in the distortion levels associated with homogeneous grain structure, such as that obtained with the combined addition of Nb and Ti. Finally, a potential process improvement is raised, the increase of the carburizing temperature may lead to the achievement of the required carburized layer with cost and process time savings. The results of this study showed that the gear manufacturing chain is sensitive to the addition of microalloying elements, so that the new alloys showed modified surface integrity. Among the manufacturing processes, those which presented the highest modification in their results were isothermal annealing, carburizing, and grinding. Therefore, microalloyed steels represent a class of materials that can be employed in the gear manufacturing chain and offer an optimized surface integrity state.