In Christianity, a collegiate church is a church where the daily office of worship is maintained by a college of canons, a non-monastic or "secular" community of clergy, organised as a self-governing corporate body, headed by a dignitary bearing a title which may vary, such as dean or provost.

In its governance and religious observance, a collegiate church is similar in some respects to a cathedral, but a collegiate church is not the seat of a bishop and has no diocesan responsibilities.

Collegiate churches have often been supported by endowments, including lands, or by tithe income from appropriated benefices.

The church building commonly provides both distinct spaces for congregational worship and for the choir offices of the canons.

In the early medieval period, before the development of the parish system in Western Christianity, many new church foundations were staffed by groups of secular priests, living a communal life and serving an extensive territory. In England these churches were termed minsters, from the Latin monasterium, although only a few were truly houses of monks. In the 9th and 10th centuries many such churches adopted formal rules of governance, commonly derived from those composed by Chrodegang of Metz for Metz cathedral, and thenceforth came to be described as "collegiate"; and there were also new foundations of this type.

Originally, the endowments of these foundations were held in a common treasury from which each canon received a proportion for their subsistence, such canons being termed portioners; but from the 11th century onwards, the richer collegiate churches tended to be provided with new statutes establishing the priests of the college as canons within a formal chapter such that each canon was supported by a separate endowment, or prebend; such canons being termed prebendaries. A few major collegiate bodies remained portionary – such as Beverley Minster and the cathedral chapters of Utrecht and Exeter – but in less affluent foundations, the pooled endowments of the community continued to be apportioned between the canons. Both prebendaries and portioners tended in this period to abandon communal living, each canon establishing his own house within the precinct of the church. In response to which, and generally on account of widespread concern that the religious life of collegiate communities might be insufficiently rigorous, many collegiate foundations in the 12th century adopted the Augustinian rule, and become fully monastic, as for example at Dorchester Abbey and Christchurch Priory.

Because each prebend or portion provided a discrete source of income as a separate benefice, in the later medieval period canons increasingly tended to be non-resident, paying a vicar to undertake divine service in their place. Kings and bishops came to regard prebends as useful sources of income for favoured servants and supporters, and it was not uncommon for a bishop or archbishop also to hold half a dozen or more collegiate prebends or deaneries.

From the 13th century onwards, existing collegiate foundations (like monasteries) also attracted chantry endowments, usually a legacy in a will providing for masses to be sung for the repose of the souls of the testator and their families by the collegiate clergy or their vicars. The same impetus to establish endowed prayer also led to many new collegiate foundations in this later period; under which an existing parish church would be rebuilt to accommodate a new chantry college; commonly with the intention that the rectory of the parish should be appropriated to support the new foundation. A new organisational structure was developed for these bodies, by which endowment income was held collectively, and each canon received a fixed stipend conditional on being personally resident, such canons being termed fellows, or chaplains led by a warden or master. In this arrangement, only the office of warden constituted a separate benefice; appointment to the individual canonries being at the discretion of the chapter. Chantry colleges still maintained the daily divine office with the additional prime function of offering masses in intercession for departed members of the founder's family; but also typically served charitable or educational purposes, such as providing hospitals or schools. For founders, this presented the added advantage that masses for the repose of themselves and their families endowed in a chantry would be supported by a guaranteed congregation of grateful and virtuous recipients of charity, which conferred a perceived advantage in endowing such a chantry in a parish church over doing so in a monastery. Consequently, in the later medieval period, testators consistently tended to favour chantries linked to parochial charitable endowments.