The past two decades have witnessed increasing infections due to multidrug-resistant bacteria. Therefore, transmission of these pathogens could limit the antibiotic therapy options. Many reports suggest that initiation of appropriate antimicrobial therapy can be lifesaving. Physicians rely on combination of clinical, epidemiological and demographic data to guide empirical therapy because results of culture and antimicrobial susceptibility testing may require 48 hours or longer. Therefore, an ongoing effort for the development of earlier and more sensitive detection of resistant bacteria is inevitable. This review presents a summary of the most advanced methods (e.g. PCR-based techniques, flow cytometry, mass spectrometry, microarrays and others) that are able to rapidly detect antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens which have the potential to become valuable alternatives to the existing methods (standard phenotypic resistance testing) in the very near future.