AbstractThe finite element (FE) solution of geomechanical problems in realistic settings raises a few numerical issues depending on the actual process addressed by the analysis. There are two basic problems where the linear solver efficiency may play a crucial role: 1. fully coupled consolidation and 2. faulted uncoupled consolidation. A class of general solvers becoming increasingly popular relies on the Krylov subspace (or Conjugate Gradient‐like) methods, provided that an efficient preconditioner is available. For both problems mentioned above, the possible preconditioners include the diagonal scaling (DS), the Incomplete LU decomposition (ILU), the mixed constraint preconditioning (MCP) and the multilevel incomplete factorization (MIF). The development and the performance of these algorithms have been the topic of several recent works. The present paper aims at providing a survey of the preconditioners available to date in computational geomechanics. In particular, a review and a critical discussion of DS, ILU, MCP and MIF are given along with some comparative numerical results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.