Abstract: Saline-alkali land is widely distributed in China, covering more than 36 million hectares. Soil salinization has become one of the important restricting factors to the sustainable development of agriculture. The key to the saline-alkali land reclamation is to explore soil water-salt transport law. The water-salt model is the most effective way to simulate and predict their dynamic changes in farmland soil. At present, great research progresses have been made on the basic theory and model application of soil water-salt transport, including theoretical mechanisms, influencing factors and numerical models. A comprehensive analysis is helpful to clarify the current research situation of water-salt transport in saline-alkali land and would provide a reference for the saline-alkali land amendment in China. This review summarized the progress of soil water-salt transport in saline-sodic soil from the perspective of theoretical mechanisms, influencing factors and model applications, focused on the advantages, disadvantages and application effects of several commonly used water-salt models, and pointed out that the future regional/watershed scale study of water-salt models should be better combined with GIS technology.