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To meet the demanding requirements for clean energy production, the need to develop advanced electrocatalysts for efficiently catalysing the water splitting reactions attracts a continuously increased attention. However, to meet the anticipated expansion in green hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, the catalysts used for the water splitting reaction not only need to satisfy the required figures of merit but should concurrently be based mainly on abundant, non-critical materials with low environmental impact. In last decades, non-noble metal catalysts, based on transition metals, rare-earth metals, dichalcogenides, and light elements such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and sulphur have shown improved performance. Moreover, in recent years increased interest has been focused on variations of such materials, more specifically on the introduction of defects to further boost their catalytic performance. Through the many studies performed over the last years, it is now possible to summarize, understand and describe the role of these defects for the water splitting reactions, namely the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions, and thereby to suggest strategies in the development of next generation electrocatalysts. This is the goal of the current review; we critically summarize the latest progress on the role of introduced defects for catalytic electrolysis applications by scrutinizing the structure–performance correlation as well as the specific catalytic activity. A broad class of nanomaterials is covered, comprising transition metal dichalcogenides, transition metal oxides and carbides, carbon-based materials as well as metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). Finally, the main challenges and future strategies and perspectives in this rapidly evolving field are provided at the end of the review.