The paper describes the magnetoelastic effects and the existing concepts of the formation of magnetic textures under the action of elastic stresses in ferromagnetic materials. The possibilities of using magnetic parameters to assess the acting stresses in structural steels are shown: the assessment of the value of uniaxial compressive stresses is practically not difficult, however, there is a problem of assessing tensile stresses in low-alloy steels due to the ambiguous dependence of the magnetic characteristics on elastic tensile deformation. Possible reasons for this ambiguity are discussed, and methods for solving this problem using the anisotropy of the coercive force and the parameters of the magnetic rigidity spectra are shown. The possibilities of evaluating the acting stresses in multilayer ferromagnetics based on the field dependences of the differential magnetic permeability are considered. Papers on the study of the influence of complexly stressed states on the magnetic characteristics of ferromagnetic materials are discussed.