Pressure-driven membranes-based desalination provides an effective and promising strategy to deal with the worldwide fresh water crisis. However, some drawbacks are still restricting their wider applications. Therefore, it still remains a great challenge to explore the novel technologies to develop new types of pressure-driven desalination membranes and to improve the properties of the present ones. Layer-by-layer (LBL) assembly technology, which can produce charged thin films on molecular levels by adsorbing oppositely charged polyelectrolytes and/or other nano-species via different interactions, provides a tunable and facile method to tailor separation membranes with desired properties. Moreover, LBL assembly has shown great potential for exploring multifunctional pressure-driven desalination membranes including reverse osmosis (RO) and forward osmosis (FO) membranes. This review aims to give a comprehensive discussion and comment on the state-of-the-art developments of LBL assembled technology applied on the pressure-driven desalination membranes, mainly focusing on RO and FO membranes It is sincerely expected that this review can provide a scientific view and give some fundamental clues for acquiring new methodologies for the exploration of pressure-driven desalination membranes with preferable performances based on LBL assembly technology. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.