The development of suitable chemical sensors for the selective detection and quantification of antibiotics has aroused tremendous research interests in recent years because of their serious menace to the environment. The excessive accumulation, through high human consumption and animal activities, of antibiotics in the soil can trigger pernicious effects on the living systems and it necessitates the development of suitable sensors. Among the various detection methods that are currently available, the fluorescent technique has become an alternative and effective method for the identification of antibiotics. In recent years, a variety of fluorescent sensors have been designed concerning the discriminative sensing of antibiotics both in solution and vapor-phase. In this review article, we attempted to systematically summarize a report on the recent advancements accomplished in the use of luminescent metal–organic frameworks (LMOFs) as fluorescent sensors for the discriminative sensing of different types of antibiotics. The LMOFs based fluorescent sensors described in this article are grouped according to their sensing propensity towards the particular type of antibiotics. Finally, the article provides a prospect on the advantages and existing challenges in antibiotics detection using LMOFs based fluorescent sensors and the future direction of this field has also been stated. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.