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Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractThe classical three-dimensional Hertz contact problem is re-examined in the present work within the context of couple-stress elasticity. This theory introduces characteristic material length scales that emerge from the underlying microstructure and has proved to be very effective yet rather simple for modeling complex microstructured materials. An exact solution of the axisymmetric contact problem is obtained through Hankel integral transforms and singular integral equations. The goal is to examine to what extend this gradient theory captures the experimentally observed indentation response and the related size effects in materials with microstructure. Furthermore, the present work extends the classical Hertz contact solution in the framework of a generalized continuum theory providing thus a useful theoretical background for the interpretation of spherical indentation tests of microstructured materials. The results obtained in the present work can be used in order to model nano/micro indentation experiments of several materials, such as polymers, ceramics, composites, cellular materials, foams, masonry, and bone tissues, of which their macroscopic response is influenced by the microstructural characteristic lengths.