Residual stress is an important performance indicator of optics, which is of great significance to the fa-brications and applications of optical components. Residual stress measurement methods of optics can be summed up into two categories: methods based on the strain measurement and on the stress induced birefringence mea-surement, respectively. The strain based methods, which are built upon crystal dynamics and elastic mechanics, in-cluding X-ray diffraction (XRD), Stoney curvature method, and micro-Raman spectroscopic method, are well devel-oped and widely used. Methods based on the measurements of birefringence phase retardation induced by residual stress, including digital photoelasticity method, photoelasticitic modulator (PEM) method and polarization-dependent cavity ring-down method, show a higher precision. The principles, measurement precisions and application scena-rios of these residual stress measurement methods are summarized in this overview. Comparisons between the performances of these methods are performed and correlations between them are analyzed in detail.