Slot coating is a common method in the manufacture of a wide variety of products. The thickness of the coated liquid layer is set by the flow rate fed to the coating die and the speed of the substrate, and is independent of other process variables. An important operating limit of slot coating is the minimum thickness that can be coated at a given substrate speed,generally referred to as the low- flow limit. For Newtonian liquids, the mechanism that defines this limit balances the viscous, capillary and inertial forces in the flow. Although most of the liquids coated industrially are polymeric solutions and dispersions that are not Newtonian, most of the previous analyses of operability limits in slot coating dealt only with Newtonian liquids. In the case of liquids made non- Newtonian by polymer viscoelasticity, stresses can alter the force balance in various parts of the coating bead and consequently the onset of instability. In this work, the low-flow limit in cases of non-Newtonian liquids is examined by both theory and experiment. The Oldroyd-B and Giesekus constitutive equations that approximate viscoelastic behavior of polymer solutions were used, together with momentum and continuity equations, to model two-dimensional flow in the downstream part of a slot coating bead. The equation system was solved with the Finite Element Method. The results show how the viscoelastic properties can affect the stress field in the liquid and the force balance near and at the downstream meniscus, thereby illustrating how non-Newtonian behavior can alter the flow instabilities that determine the coating window of slot coating. The flows themselves were visualized by video microscopy and the low-flow limit was found by observing, at given substrate speed, the feed rate at which the flow becomes unstable. Different solutions of low molecular weight polyethylene glycol and high molecular weight polyethylene oxide in water were used in order to evaluate the effect of mildly viscoelastic behavior on the process.