Reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls are widely used in medium- to high-rise buildings to provide the lateral strength, stiffness and energy dissipation capacity required to resist lateral loads arising from wind or earthquakes. In the past few decades, there has been considerable advancement in the design of RC walls for new construction. The newly adopted performance evaluation methodology and capacity design principles are examples of these important advancements in seismic engineering.Therefore, there is an essential need to upgrade the seismic performance of existing RC shear walls so that they can meet the requirements of the new performance-based seismic design techniques. Several retrofit techniques using different materials are reported in the literature. This paper presents different retrofit techniques that were used to increase the seismic resistance of existing RC shear walls. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each retrofit technique and the corresponding characteristic enhancements. The objective of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art on the recent advancements and challenges in the area of retrofit of RC shear walls.