In the shipbuilding and marine fields, the pre-treatment of painted surfaces for cleaning creates environmental pollution problems. Laser cleaning is an eco-friendly surface pre-treatment process which selectively removing contaminants on a surface by vaporizing them with a laser beam. In this study, a pulse laser was employed to laser clean shop primer and epoxy painted steel plates. The evaporation characteristics of the two paints and the laser cleaning characteristics were analyzed according to the number of laser scans. It was determined that the removal of epoxy paint, which has a relatively low evaporation point, was higher than that of the shop primer paint. In addition, to remove the coating surface and oxide layer while minimizing damage to the base metal, it is important to select the laser cleaning parameters including the number of laser scans.