Sustainable building modernisation is an important step towards reducing the negative environmental impact of buildings, reducing energy consumption in existing residential buildings, creating more comfortable and functional living conditions, and improving their technical condition. Unfortunately, this is a burdensome, time-consuming and costly process that requires difficult decision-making. They must reasonably enable the intended sustainability goals to be achieved. Bearing this in mind, the article presents research on the issue of modernisation residential buildings. The aim is to provide up-to-date knowledge aimed at supporting modernisation decision-making. A study of the literature shows that research on sustainable modernisation of residential buildings is very extensive and unsystematic. Research areas include issues focused primarily on environmental and economic sustainability goals. More and more research is being conducted towards modernisation that takes into account wider social needs. Recent research points to the need to implement more holistic modernisation scenarios that meet a broader set of sustainability goals and criteria and that involve more stakeholders at earlier stages of modernisation. However, achieving sustainable building goals requires decision support for contrasting objectives when selecting optimal modernisation strategies. Therefore, increasingly better and more efficient tools, methods and decision support systems are being developed that provide systematic approaches for carrying out sustainable building modernisations. Building renovation decisions also require the identification and removal of barriers to modernisation and the skilful management of the various types of knowledge in terms of its creation, processing and use, providing the various stakeholders with appropriately processed knowledge during the residential modernisation stage