AbstractImproving healthcare performance has become a need for resource optimisation in a field where they are scarce. Activity‐Based Costing (ABC) has been applied for more than 30 years to allocate costs and provide information for decision‐making. This paper seeks to review previous literature in the health field that analysed this cost system and its new version, TDABC (Time‐Driven Activity‐Based Costing). Five hundred ninety articles published from 1989 to 2019 were retrieved from Scopus and Medline. The review includes descriptive, relational and content analyses. Results show that the interest in applying these cost systems is growing, especially in journals focusing on the financial aspects of health, policy and planning, and radiology. However, there is a difference in the application of ABC and TDABC. ABC is more related to efficiency and more used in laboratories. In contrast, TDABC is primarily used in hospitals and addressing the value of health rather than cost‐effectiveness. On the other hand, the findings suggest that TDABC present greater opportunities for publication compared with ABC. Its progression is higher and gets more citations. The current article contributes to broadening the field's vision and encourages authors for further research.