Introduction: elderly people with mild cognitive impairment (CCL) manifest difficulties in performing daily living activities (AVD), however, there are difficulties related to identification and classification of impaired activities. Objective: to assess whether there is evidence in the literature of AVD impairment in older adults with CCL. Methods: literature review based on search in the PUBMED and LILACS databases using the keywords: "mild cognitive impairment" AND "activities of daily living" and their correlates in Portuguese and Spanish that resulted in 759 publications. Repeated studies, reviews, validation, editorials, and guidelines studies, and letters to the editor and commentaries were excluded. Clinical trials, descriptive, comparative, and cohorts studies in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, published up to 2012 were selected, whose main objective was to investigate AVD in older adults with CCL. The inclusion criteria were met by 41 studies for this review. Results: clinical, cognitive, and functional variables were measured. There was variation in the sample size of individuals with CCL, according to age (from 71.3 to 76.8 years), educational level (2.5 to 15.8 years), and gender of participants, predominantly females. Only two studies were conducted in Brazil. The functional decline was present in all the studies analyzed and measured using different standardized tests and non-standard measurements. Conclusions: subtle deficits were identified in advanced and instrumental AVDs, which usually go unnoticed, thereby compromising the quality of life and constituting a risk of pre-dementia stage to develop into Alzheimer's dementia.