A comprehensive review is given of recent advances in the study of metastable phases in rare-earth permanent magnets. The relations between the structures of the metastable and equilibrium phases and the transformations from the former to the latter are discussed. The formation of the phases is found to depend on the difference between the symmetries of the metastable and equilibrium phases. The magnetic properties of the metastable-phase rare-earth permanent magnets synthesized by various processes, such as mechanical alloying, mechanical milling, rapid quenching, hydrogenation, disproportionation, desorption and recombination, solid-state reaction, solid-gas reaction, self-flux and sputtering, are compared. The main conclusion of this article is that searching for new metastable phases with high magnetic performance will be one of the most active directions in the research on rare-earth permanent magnets.

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