Purpose Considering its vast utility in industries, this paper aims to present a detailed review on fundamentals, classification and progresses in pressure sensors, along with its wide area of applications, its design aspects and challenges, to provide state-of-the-art gist to the researchers of the similar domain at one place. Design/methodology/approach Swiftly emerging research prospects in the micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) enable to build complex and sophisticated micro-structures on a substrate containing moving masses, cantilevers, flexures, levers, linkages, dampers, gears, detectors, actuators and many more on a single chip. One of the MEMS initial products that emerged into the micro-system technology is MEMS pressure sensor. Because of their high performance, low cost and compact in size, these sensors are extensively being adopted in numerous applications, namely, aerospace, automobile and bio-medical domain, etc. These application requirements drive and impose tremendous conditions on sensor design to overcome the tedious design and fabrication procedure before its reality. MEMS-based pressure sensors enable a wide range of pressure measurement as per the application requirements. Findings The paper provides a detailed review on fundamentals, classification and progresses in pressure sensors, along with its wide area of applications, its design aspects and challenges, to provide state of the art gist to the researchers of the similar domain at one place. Originality/value The present paper discusses the basics of MEMS pressure sensors, their working principles, different design aspects, classification, type of sensing diaphragm used and illustration of various transduction mechanisms. Moreover, this paper presents a comprehensive review on present trend of research on MEMS-based pressure sensors, its applications and the research gap observed till date along with the scope for future work, which has not been discussed in earlier reviews.