With the rapid development of the electric vehicle and electronics industries, the production of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) increases continuously, leading to the number of spent LIBs increased dramatically. The cathode materials of spent LIBs contain a large amount of high-value metals, such as Li, Co and Ni. The effective recovery of those metals can achieve resource recycling.Hydrometallurgy technology is the most widely used method for the recovery of metal elements from spent LIBs cathode materials, and leaching is a key process of this technology. Among numerous leaching agents, deep eutectic solvent (DES) is a type of clean and effective green reagents, which exhibit good application prospects in leaching cathode materials such as lithium cobalt oxide, lithium manganese oxide, and lithium nickel cobalt manganese oxide. In this paper, the DES for leaching cathode materials were categorized into five groups according to the structure of hydrogen-bond donors, the leaching performance and mechanism of each group DES was discussed, the merits and disadvantages of each group DES were compared, and the application prospects of the DES in LIBs recycling was proposed.