MasterChef: The Professionals is a BBC television competitive cooking show which aired on BBC Two from 2008 to 2019, transferring to BBC One in 2020. It is a spin-off from the main MasterChef series and features professional working chefs. Introduced in 2008, Gregg Wallace and India Fisher reprised their roles as co-judge and voiceover respectively. Michel Roux Jr., a two-Michelin-star chef, was a judge, assisted, from 2009, by his sous-chef Monica Galetti. Since 2011, Sean Pertwee has held the voiceover role.

In 2014, Roux Jr left the show due to "a conflict in commercial interests". He was replaced by Marcus Wareing. In 2022, Galetti announced that she was taking a break from the show; she was replaced as a judge by Anna Haugh for the 2022 (Series 15) season. On 23 March 2023, Galetti announced on Instagram that she would be returning to the show as a judge for the 16th series, which was broadcast from 23 October 2023 onwards. Matt Tebbutt is due to replace Wallace as a judge from series 18.

Typically, the show runs for seven weeks and twenty-one episodes (reduced to eighteen for Series 15) transmitted from early November until Christmas, although the precise number of shows per week, number of contestants, the running order and nature of the challenges and the number of chefs eliminated at each round has varied from series to series. There are four weeks of "heats" (the final show of each week being a quarter final), a "knockout" week, a semi-final week and a finals week. Below is a synopsis of a typical series:

Each heat week begins with six chefs per show (this was cut to four per show in Series 15). The three (or four) remaining chefs then participate in the quarter-final at the end of that week.

Typically 12 chefs are left by this stage. The precise challenges have varied over the series. In Series 15, Knockout Week was dropped and the competition progressed directly to the semi-final, but it reappeared in Series 16 onwards.

Legend:   Still in production     No longer airing