Shear horizontal (SH) ultrasonic guided waves are commonly used for non-destructive evaluation of plates and pipes. In steel pipes, a coating layer is often applied to the outer surface in order to prevent it from corrosion. The applied coating layer presents considerably lower acoustic impedance than the pipe main material, namely, steel, nevertheless, its presence significantly affects the propagation characteristics of SH guided wave modes, since one deals with a multilayered waveguide problem. Due to the viscoelastic properties of the coating layer, ultrasonic guided wave modes that adequately propagate in an equivalent bare pipe can become an unsuitable choice in a coated pipe, due to high attenuation, rendering pipe inspection unfeasible. In this thesis, it was investigated which SH guided wave modes are more adequate for circumferential inspections of a coated pipe of interest, namely, a 6.35 mm thick steel pipe and a polyethylene coating whose thicknesses varies. A semi-analytical model was used to calculate the dispersion and attenuation curves and a finite element numerical model was further exploited to investigate the propagating modes in coated waveguided under the presence of defects. Results show that, in the analyzed cases, at the high-frequency-thickness regime, the quasi-SH0 mode at 10 mm wavelength is the most suitable choice for an evaluation with no previous knowledge of the specimen. However, with knowledge of the characteristics of the evaluated specimen, it is possible to select other modes that can have a lower attenuation. Therefore, a careful selection of the most suitable operating mode is paramount in order to inspect a defect with ultrasonic guided waves in pipes with coating. Considering the studied cases, namely, SH0 and SH1 at of 25 mm, 20 mm, 15 mm, and 10 mm wavelength, the most suitable SH guided wave modes are SH1 at 25mm - 285 kHz, SH0 at 20 mm - 160 kHz, SH0 at 15 mm - 210 kHz, SH1 at 15 mm - 330 kHz, SH0 at 10 mm - 310 kHz and SH1 at 10 mm - 400 kHz, showing approximated attenuation of 21 dB/m, 3 dB/m, 15 dB/m, 13 dB/m, 4 dB/m and 17 dB/m, respectively, and clear defect identification by mean of its reflectivity. Therefore, the present study is useful in order to design a reliable experimental setup when analyzing a pipe whose coating has viscoelastic properties.