Soil and water contamination by rapid urbanization, industrialization and anthropogenic activities poses a major threat to environmental and human health. Conventional remediation techniques, while widely applied, often suffer from limitations such as high cost, long processing times, and incomplete contaminant removal. Nanomaterials (NMs), owing to their high surface area, tunable surface chemistry, and unique physicochemical properties, have emerged as promising candidates for efficient soil and water remediation. Herein, recent advances in the use of nanomaterials (NMs) especially the metal/metal oxide-based and carbon-based NMs have been discussed for soil and water remediation. Contaminants such as heavy metals, radionuclides, organic pollutants, petroleum wastes, microplastics present in soil or water are efficiently removed by the NMs through mechanisms such as electrostatic interaction, complexation, photodegradation, phytoremediation, H-bonding, adsorption and hydrophobic interactions. Overall, the remediation of contaminated soil or water through this nanotechnology enabled strategy offers a fast, sustainable, efficient, and highly targeted approach for enhancing environmental restoration.