For many bioactive chemicals contained in traditional Chinese medicines, pressurized liquid extraction has become a preferred green extraction method. This review goes over the extraction principles and how to improve the extraction effi-ciency by optimizing the extraction parameters. The use of various solvent combinations and other extraction additives to improve extraction efficiency is explored. The utilization of combined and hyphenated sample preparation and analytical proce-dures, as well as the dynamic mode of extraction in pressurized liquid extraction, are discussed. This review also summarized applications that used pressurized liquid extraction to enrich different functional components from medicinal herbs.