There are two basic gas chemistries used for dry etching of III-V semiconductors. The most common discharges contain chlorine, but these generally give rise to somewhat rough surface morphologies for In-containing compounds. More recently methane/hydrogen mixtures have been demonstrated to give low rate, smooth etching of In-based materials. In this work we describe the use of gas mixtures containing both CH and CI species. The hydrochlorofluorocarbons CHCl2F and CHCIF2 with O2 or H2 addition were used to reactively ion etch GaAs, InP, AlGaAs, GaSb, InGaAs and AlInAs as a function of etch time, plasma power density, pressure and gas composition. At moderate power densities (0.56 W · cm−2) the etch rates are in the range 125 Å · min−1 (AlInAs) to 1000 A · min−1 (GaAs). All of the materials exhibit smooth surface morphologies over a wide range of RIE parameters and there is no significant lattice disorder introduced for low power RIE as evidenced by PL and diode I-V measurements. Thin (≤40 Å) surface residue layers of CI (3–9 at. %) and F(≤3 at. %) for all materials except AlInAs are present after dry etching, but these can be removed by simple solvent cleaning.