Thermoelectric (TE) materials can interconvert waste heat into electricity, which will become alternative energy sources in the future. The high-entropy alloys (HEAs) as a new class of materials are well-known for some excellent properties, such as high friction toughness, excellent fatigue resistance, and corrosion resistance. Here, we present a series of HEAs to be potential candidates for the thermoelectric materials. The thermoelectric properties of Y x CoCrFeNi, Gd x CoCrFeNiCu, and annealed Al 0.3 CoCrFeNi were investigated. The effects of grain size and formation of the second phase on thermoelectric properties were revealed. In HEAs, we can reduce the thermal conductivity by controlling the phonon scattering due to the considerable complexity of the alloys. The Y, Gd-doped HEAs are competitive candidate thermoelectric materials for energy conversion in the future.The thermoelectric-power generation or refrigeration device made of thermoelectric material has the advantages of being noise free, zero emission and pollution free, lacking vibration, small volume, etc. It has been applied in deep space exploration and refrigeration, and has great potential in waste heat power generation [20,21].Conventional thermoelectric materials currently in use include Bi 2 Te 3 based, PbTe based and SiGe based, etc. Bi 2 Te 3 is currently the most commercially successful thermoelectric material near room temperature. It is widely used in the field of the thermoelectric refrigeration, and is also the thermoelectric material with the highest power generation efficiency at low temperature [22]. Although Bi 2 Te 3 has been commercialized, its performance can be further improved by doping, composition adjustment, etc. PbTe is the medium temperature thermoelectric material that has been studied for the longest time and PbTe-based materials have been successfully used in the NASA aerospace missions many times since 1960. In recent years, PbTe-based thermoelectric materials have made great progress. The application temperature range of the Si-Ge alloy is more than 1000 K. It has been successfully applied to some deep space detectors. For example, in the radioisotope temperature difference battery of the Cassini Saturn detector, the thermoelectric conversion device is prepared by the Si-Ge alloy. However, the reserves of Te and Ge elements are scarce and very costly; Pb is toxic, pollutes the environment, and endangers people's health. Therefore, the development of environmentally friendly, new low-cost thermoelectric materials is particularly urgent.HEAs are always being studied for their mechanical properties. Maybe many new and unexpected properties remain for us to explore. In the search for TE materials, the performance of this kind of material is estimated by the dimensionless figure of merit, defined as ZT = S 2 Tσ/k [23], where S is the Seebeck coefficient, T is the absolute temperature, σ is the electrical conductivity, and k = k e + k l is the total thermal conductivity, where k e and k l are the electronic and lattice co...