Technical Abstract: Aquaculture is emerging as the fastest growing food-producing industry in the world due to the increasing demand for food fish consumption. However, the intensive culture of food fish has led to outbreaks of various bacterial diseases, resulting in annual economic losses to the aquaculture industry billions of dollars worldwide. Feeding infected fish with antibiotic medicated food is a general practice. However, such practice has led to the resistance development of bacterial pathogens to the antibiotics used, resulting in higher dose of antibiotics required for effective control, which increasing becomes a public concern. Therefore, alternatives to antibiotics that give similar or enhanced protection to aquatic animals are urgently needed. Various vaccines have been developed recently to combat bacterial diseases in aquaculture. The purpose of this review is to summarize the major bacterial pathogens in aquaculture and the development of vaccines as alternatives to antibiotics to protect aquatic animals from these bacterial diseases.