Five intrinsic subtypes of invasive breast cancers have been identified by gene expression profiling: luminal A, luminal B, normal breast-like, HER-2-overexpressing and basal-like subtypes. The different subtypes present the different incidence, prognosis and response to therapy. Immunohistochemical staining has been used as the surrogates for gene expression profiling to divide breast cancer into luminal, HER-2 and triple-negative subtypes. ER, PR and HER-2 are the most commonly used immunohistochemical markers. Ki67, CK5 and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) are useful in distinguishing luminal A from luminal B subtype and distinguishing basal-like subtype from unclassified triple-negative breast cancer. More recently, biomarkers such as androgen receptor (AR) and p53 have been shown to further stratify these molecular subtypes. Although immunohistochemistry-based molecular classification has displayed clinical significance similar to gene expression profiling-defined molecular classification, it has the following limitations: a lack of standardization in nomenclature, a lack of standardized definitions for different subtypes and no standardized cutoff value for each biomarker. With reviewing recent English language literature, a panel of immunohistochemistry-based molecular subtypes is proposed, including ER positive breast cancer, HER-2 positive breast cancer, triple-negative breast cancer and their subgroups.