Up to five regions with different transport properties can be identified in tokamak plasma with edge and internal transport barriers. This includes edge and core barriers, the region near the separatrix, which is dominated by atomic physics, the core plasma (within 0.4⩽ρ⩽0.8, where ρ is a normalized minor radius) and the central part of plasma volume, which is often dominated by large-scale MHD phenomena. An overview of the present understanding of heat and particle transport in these five regions will be given, which includes progress in experimental observations, theory of plasma microturbulence and predictive modelling.