Polarization elements for 20-400eV vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) have been developed using multilayers. Unavailability of transparent media is characteristic of optics in the VUV region. VUV polarizers are based on a multilayer mirror at the pseud-Brewster’s angle. General principle of selecting material combinations to obtain high polarizance multilayers of reflection type is presented. Theoretical description on reflection phase retarders, transmission polarizers, and transmission phase retarders is also given. Several VUV multilayer elements were fabricated and characterized using synchrotron radiation VUV source, and synchrotron radiation beamline optics were diagnosed using VUV multilayer analyzers at the same time. Multilayer analyzers were also applied to Faraday rotation measurements around M_2,3 edges of Ni films.