The key to saline land management and improvement is to understand the soil water and salt transport laws and to carry out scientific regulation. In order to propose a scientific and reasonable model for soil salinity control, it is necessary to study the principle of water and salt transport in soil, the transport law with time and space, which is also the theoretical basis for understanding the occurrence and evolution of saline soils in the region and preventing secondary salinization of soil. In recent years, the study of water-salt transport and its simulation model has become one of the research hotspots in the field of agriculture, especially in the northwest of China. This paper systematically summarizes the research progress and applications of water-salt transport characteristics, models, influencing factors and the popular software Hydrus at home and abroad, and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the models and the influencing factors of water-salt transport, and introduces the research results of many scholars in the field of water-salt transport, and gives an outlook on the future research and development trend of water-salt transport.