Water is an essential element for day to day activities like agriculture, industries and domestic uses etc for human beings. Now-a-days, water pollution by heavy metal is one of the major environmental problems. Various methods like chemical precipitation, ion exchange, membrane filtration, coagulation-flocculation, flotation and adsorption have been adopted for the removal of heavy metal ions from the water. Among all these methods adsorption process has been widely used for the removal of heavy metals due to its low cost, environment friendly nature and easy availability. The commercial adsorbents, bio-adsorbents and nano-sorbents possess high removal capacity, thus used for the removal of heavy metals from waste water treatment. In recent years nanosorbents used in environmental remediation as it possess large surface area and high substance specificity. The present review aims to assemble the role of functionalized graphene oxide for heavy metal removal from waste water. The presence of various functional groups on graphene oxide provides abundant sites and increase surface area which improves the adsorption efficiency of pollutants. Thus an attempt is made to emphasis on low cost adsorbent and search for the parameters that affects the adsorption of heavy metals on various adsorbents