MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small non-coding RNAs (18-24 nucleotides (nt)) that regulate gene expression. MiRNAs exist widely in animals, plants and humans, and play fundamental roles in many biological processes, such as growth, development, differentiation and reproduction, etc. MiRNA is believed to be involved in the regulation of nearly 30% of all human genes and its expression level is closely related to some major diseases of mankind. Thus, quantitive detection and expression analysis of miRNA are significant to the understanding of functional mechanism of miRNAs, the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and the development of the correlated gene drugs, etc. MiRNA detection is mostly based on the hybridization and amplification techniques of nucleic acids, which includs northern blotting technique, microarray, in situ hybridization, real-time reverse transcription PCR, isothermal rolling circle amplification and conjugated polymer-based miRNA detection. With the discovery of miRNA in different species and the thoroughly functional research of miRNA, the detection methods have been improved continuously and the new techniques, involving amplification, labeled probe and detection, have been developed successively. This paper summarizes the progress of miRNA detection, reviews the advantages and the disadvantages of all kinds of methods and prospects the miRNA detection trends.