This review focuses on the relationship between cash transfer-based social assistance programs and the climate resilience of households and communities. Governments in lower and middle-income countries have adopted cash transfer programs widely – both in the conditional and unconditional variants – across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and south and southeast Asia. The paper uses the large literature evaluating the material impacts of cash transfers to identify how they affect the climate resilience of households and social systems. Studies of cash transfers only rarely analyze social resilience outcomes directly; the review therefore examines socio-economic indicators that are used in common in research on cash transfers and climate resilience. It finds that although cash transfers support improvements in indicators associated with absorptive and adaptive resilience outcomes, changes in transformative resilience indicators are rare. For a deeper understanding of the processes through which cash transfers influence social resilience, it is important that future studies of cash transfers assess how socioeconomic outcomes of cash transfers relate to key system resilience features such as modularity, redundancy, diversity, learning, self-organization, and network relations.