In the present paper, two ways of taking into account surface energy in thermoelastic problems with phase transitions are presented. In the first way, surface energy is considered proportional to the area of the interphase boundary. In the second way, surface energy is taken into account in an indirect fashion, as an integral of higher derivatives of the field of displacements. The similarity and differences of the dependence of the equilibrium states on the parameters for the two different methods of regularization are studied.