China’s energy supply heavily relies on coal and China’s coal resource and water resource has a reverse distribution. The problem of water shortages restricts the applications of wet coal beneficiation technologies in drought regions. The present situation highlights the significance and urgency of developing dry beneficiation technologies of coal. Besides, other countries that produce large amounts of coal also encounter serious problem of lack of water for coal beneficiation, such as American, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Turkey and India. Thus, dry coal beneficiation becomes the research hot-points in the field of coal cleaning worldwide in recent years. This paper systematically reviewed the promising research efforts on dry coal beneficiation reported in literature in last 5 years and discussed the progress in developments of dry coal beneficiation worldwide. Finally, we also elaborated the prospects and the challenges of the development of dry coal beneficiation.