Elevated concentration of nitrate in drinking water is harmful to people's health, particularly to infants. Therefore it is essential to develop an environmentally sustainable removal strategy to effectively remove nitrate from water. Among the available treatment technologies, adsorption process can be considered as an effective technique for nitrate removal due to the characterics such as simple design and easy operation, high efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and availability of low cost adsorbent materials. This paper reviews the recent trends in scientific research and development on the exploitation of clay and clay minerals for nitrate removal from water, focusing on the effect of various factors such as contact time, particle size, adsorbent dose, initial concentration, pH, and co-existing ions on adsorption, removal mechanism, isotherms and kinetics of the adsorption process. © 2017 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.