The increasing demand for sustainable energy resources has initiated the investigation of biomass conversion over a wide range of catalysts. Among those, transition metal carbides have been extensively studied which demonstrated distinct reactivity and/or selectivity from transition or noble metals in a variety of chemical reactions. In this review, we summarize recent advances in the synthesis of transition metal carbides and their applications in biomass conversion, particularly focusing on the catalytic conversions of (hemi)cellulose, lignin and some typical platform chemicals to fuels or fine chemicals involving C-C, C-O-C and C-O-H bonds cleavages. Perspectives regarding the future research directions on the improvement of transition metal carbide catalysts and detailed reaction mechanism studies are also presented.