As one of the widely used structures in modern civil construction, cable system as the main bearing component is very important to the safety and service life of the whole structure. At present, the main detection methods for cable system include visual inspection, cable force measurement, acoustic emission, ray, magnetic, ultrasonic, magnetostrictive guided wave detection, etc. Based on the brief discussion and comparison of the above testing methods, it is pointed out that the magnetostrictive guided wave nondestructive testing technology has become a widely used new nondestructive testing method for cables because of its unique advantages such as large detection length, wide coverage of structure area, far away from the difficult area to be detected by testing instruments, and no need to excavate or remove the coating layer and anti-corrosion layer. In this paper, the principle, sensor, experimental research, instrument development and application of magnetostrictive guided wave detection are reviewed, and the current research difficulties, hot spots and future research trends of this technology are summarized.