Experiments on adjustable magnetic metamaterials applied in megahertz wireless power transmission AIP Advances 5, 017142 (2015) Surface waves are responsible for many phenomena occurring in metamaterials and have been studied extensively. At the same time, the effects of inter-element coupling on surface electromagnetic waves (polaritons) remain poorly understood. Using two models, one relying on the effective-medium approximation and the other on equivalent circuits, we studied theoretically surface polaritons propagating along an interface between air and a magnetic metamaterial. The metamaterial comprised split rings that could be uncoupled or coupled to each other in the longitudinal or transverse directions (along or perpendicular to the propagation direction). A metamaterial without inter-element coupling supported a single polariton. When a moderate longitudinal coupling was included, it changed the wave dispersion only quantitatively, and the results of the effective-medium and the circuit models were shown to agree at low wavenumbers. However, the presence of a transverse coupling changed the polariton dispersion dramatically. The effective-medium model yielded two branches of polariton dispersion at low values of the transverse coupling. As the coupling increased, both polaritons disappeared. The validity of the effective-medium model was further tested by employing the circuit model. In this model, surface polaritons could exist in the presence of a transverse coupling only if the boundary layer of the metamaterial included additional impedances, which could become non-Foster. The results reveal that the inter-element coupling is a major mechanism affecting the properties of the polaritons. They also highlight the limitations of using bulk effective-medium parameters for interface problems in metamaterials. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.[http://dx