In recent years, the magneto-optical properties of magnetic nanofluids have received increasing attention due to their wide range of applications in various solar energy conversion processes and also as smart fluids in tunable photonic device, optical switch, optical fiber sensor, etc. This article reviews up-to-date developments in magneto-optical transmission in ferrofluids for different optical applications. With magnetic field, the magnetic nanoparticle will undergo interesting structural transitions including chainlike formation and lateral coalescence, leading to various light transmission phenomena in ferrofluids. The orientation of the magnetic field relative to the incident light has a significant influence on the intensity of transmitted light through the suspensions. For incident light along the magnetic field, the polarization direction of light has a negligible effect on the magneto-optical transmission. However, the polarization direction of light should make a great difference for light normal to the field direction. These recent studies are comprehensively reviewed, and their main findings and potential applications are also presented and discussed. Our study is supposed to provide a general view on the research trends, existing problems and future work for the investigation of magneto-optical transmission in magnetic nanofluids.