Roll coating is distinguished by the use of one or more gaps between rotating cylinders to meter and apply a liquid layer to a substrate. Except at low speed, the film splitting flow that occurs in forward roll coating is three-dimensional and results in more or less regular stripes in the machine direction. This instability can limit the speed of the process if a smooth film is required as a final product. For Newtonian liquids, the stability of the film-split flow is determined by the competition of capillary forces and viscous forces: the onset of meniscus nonuniformity is market by a critical value of the capillary number. Although most of the liquids coated industrially are polymeric solutions and dispersions, that are not Newtonian, most of previous theoretical analyses of film splitting flows dealt only with Newtonian liquids. Non-Newtonian behavior can drastically change the nature of the flow near the free surface; when minute amounts of flexible polymer are present, the onset of the three-dimensional instability occurs at much lower speeds than in the Newtonian case. the mechanisms responsible for the early onset of this flow instability is not well understood. This free surface coating flow is analyzed here with differential constitutive models, the Oldroyld-B and the FENE-P equations. The continuity, momentum equations coupled with the constitutive models, and the non-linear mapping equations that transform the free boundary problem into a fixed boundary problem are solved by Newton s method with pseudo-arc-length continuation. The results show how the stress field changes with Weisenberg number, leading to the formation of an elastic boundary layer near the free surface and compressive elastic stresses in the crss-flow direction that may explain the onset of the ribbing instability at the smaller Capillary numbers when viscoelastic liquids are used. This work also presents the formulation for linear stanility analysis of viscoelastic free surface flows. The model leads to a generalized eigenproblem that is solved here using the Arnoldi s method with the software (ARPACK). The leading eigenvalues of the Jacobian Matrix indicate the stability of the flow. The formulation is tested in three different flows: lid-driven cavity, static liquid pool and a couette flow.