The leaks of petroleum and petroleum products can cause serious soil pollution. Conventional methods for monitoring petroleum-hydrocarbon leaks are time-consuming and poor in portability, which is difficult to meet the requirements of diagnosing large-area soil pollution and digital soil mapping. Visible and near-infrared spectroscopy (Vis-NIRS) is a low-cost and non-destructive method that allows rapid and convenient measurements, which is the most potential means for rapid acquisition of soil information as the trend of future research and development. This technology has been widely uesd for decades to monitor soil properties. However, in the field of monitoring soil contaminated with petroleum-hyrdocarbons, the research is still in its infancy and the model of retrieving petroleum-hydrocarbon content is a difficult problem. In addition, the current research achievement has seldom been summarized. In the present paper, the author discussed the feasibility of the monitoring for soil-petroleum contamination with visible and near-infrared spectroscopy and summarized the latest research progress in spectral diagnostic bands, prediction models and spectral libraries of contaminated soils in recent years. Besides, the existing shortcomings are analyzed and future research direction is put forward. It is pointed out that in the future, strengthen four aspects research for several kinds of petroleum-hydrocarbon mixture samples, general petroleum-hydrocarbon prediction model, field spectral measurement experiment and imaging spectroscopy technology, so as to provide reference for further research on soil petroleum-hydrocarbon pollution.