Display omitted •Briefly state the design strategies for luminescent lanthanide single-molecule magnets (SMMs).•Systematically survey the recent advances of luminescent lanthanide SMMs.•Discuss the magneto-luminescent behavior for lanthanide SMMs. Incorporation of two characters into one molecular entity is an effective way to afford bifunctional molecule-based materials. Lanthanides serve as a group of preferable objectives for the construction of luminescent single-molecule magnets (SMMs) due to their excellent performances in areas of SMM and luminescence for molecular materials, showing a great potential of applications in high-density data storage, quantum computing, light-emitting diodes, biofluorescence labelling, etc. This review concentrates on the design strategies for the construction of luminescent SMMs referring to the organic chromophores and transition metal-containing chromophores as the antennas, as well as the recent examples of luminescent SMMs. To investigate the magneto-luminescent behavior (including the magneto-luminescent coupling), a few of classical complexes are discussed in the review to emphasize the importance of studying the correlation/coupling between relaxation mechanism and luminescence for lanthanide SMMs.