By raising evolutionary network connections, a software‐defined network (SDN) offers a well‐managed and flexible novel network topology. The SDN efforts are provided to abstract the original network configuration for business applications and web services. Additionally, the SDN modifies the network management policies such as topology policies, deployment policies, the applicability, and infrastructure maintenance. One of the important features of the SDN is standardizing the network interfaces with the precise functional semantics in application and control flow layers. In another hand, specification and evaluation of the existing network interfaces is a main and significant challenge to prove the correctness of the configurable scenarios in the SDN approach. Recently, formal verification presents a high potential platform to evaluate the main‐layer scenarios of the SDN as the novel perspective in this area. Up to now, there is no survey and state‐of‐the‐art review on the formal verification methods in the SDN. This paper provides a systematic literature review (SLR) for the formal verification methods in the SDN in form of the SDN plans to recognize the state of the art of the open challenges. The presented SLR is classified into three main fields: application plan, data plan, and control plan approaches. The verification mechanisms are compared with each other according to the important factors such as structural properties, quality‐of‐service metrics, applied algorithms, and measurement tools.