Civil structures are usually prone to damage during their service life and it leads them to loss their serviceability and safety. Thus, damage assessment can guarantee the integrity of structures. As a result, a structural damage detection approach including two main components, a set of accelerometers to record the response data and a data mining (DM) procedure, is widely used to extract the information on the structural health condition. In the last decades, DM has provided numerous solutions to structural health monitoring (SHM) problems as an all-inclusive technique due to its powerful computational ability. This paper presents the first attempt to illustrate the data mining techniques (DMTs) applications in SHM through an intensive review of those articles dealing with the use of DMTs aimed for classification-, prediction-and optimization-based data mining methods. According to this categorization, applications of DMTs with respect to SHM research area are classified and it is concluded that, applications of DMTs in the SHM domain have increasingly been implemented, in the last decade and the most popular techniques in the area were artificial neural network (ANN), principal component analysis (PCA) and genetic algorithm (GA), respectively.