This paper described a surface motor-driven XYΘ_z stage equipped with a newly developed surface encoder as the position-detection sensor. The surface encoder consists of a two-dimensional angle sensor and a two-dimensional angle grid. The angle sensor is fixed on the stage base and the angle grid is mounted on the back the moving element of the stage. The multi-axis position of the moving element can be obtained from the angle sensor output. The surface encoder is placed inside the stage and the stage system is very compact in size. In this paper, experimental results in XY axes were presented. The travel ranges are 40 mm in XY axes the positioning resolution is better than 0.2 μm.