Abstract Although indentation experiments have long been used to measure the hardness and Young's modulus, the utility of this technique in analyzing the complete elastic–plastic response of materials under contact loading has only been realized in the past few years – mostly due to recent advances in testing equipment and analysis protocols. This paper provides a timely review of the recent progress made in this respect in extracting meaningful indentation stress–strain curves from the raw datasets measured in instrumented spherical nanoindentation experiments. These indentation stress–strain curves have produced highly reliable estimates of the indentation modulus and the indentation yield strength in the sample, as well as certain aspects of their post-yield behavior, and have been critically validated through numerical simulations using finite element models as well as direct in situ scanning electron microscopy (SEM) measurements on micro-pillars. Much of this recent progress was made possible through the introduction of a new measure of indentation strain and the development of new protocols to locate the effective zero-point of initial contact between the indenter and the sample in the measured datasets. This has led to an important key advance in this field where it is now possible to reliably identify and analyze the initial loading segment in the indentation experiments. Major advances have also been made in correlating the local mechanical response measured in nanoindentation with the local measurements of structure at the indentation site using complementary techniques. For example, it has been shown that the combined use of Orientation Imaging Microscopy (OIM, using Electron BackScattered Diffraction (EBSD)) and nanoindentation on polycrystalline metallic samples can yield important information on the orientation dependence of indentation yield stress, which can in turn be used to estimate percentage increase in the local slip resistance in deformed samples. The same methods have been used successfully to probe the intrinsic role of grain boundaries in the overall mechanical deformation of the sample. More recently, these protocols have been extended to characterize local mechanical property changes in the damaged layers in ion-irradiated metals. Similarly, the combined use of Raman spectroscopy and nanoindentation on samples of mouse bone has revealed tissue-level correlations between the mineral content at the indentation site and the associated local mechanical properties. The new protocols have also provided several new insights into the buckling response in dense carbon nanotube (CNT) brushes. These and other recent successful applications of nanoindentation are expected to provide the critically needed information for the maturation of physics-based multiscale models for the mechanical behavior of most advanced materials. In this paper, we review these latest developments and identify the future challenges that lie ahead.