The forty-seventh season of the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live premiered on October 2, 2021, during the 2021–22 television season with host Owen Wilson and musical guest Kacey Musgraves, and concluded on May 21, 2022 with host Natasha Lyonne and musical guest Japanese Breakfast. For the first time, the season's first five episodes and the remainder from episode ten onward were live-streamed on the streaming service Peacock in addition to its coast-to-coast live television broadcast.

Prior to the start of the season, longtime cast member Beck Bennett departed after spending eight seasons on the show since 2013. Featured player Lauren Holt, who had joined the show for the previous season, departed the show after the finale.

Three new featured players were added: comedic actor and filmmaker Aristotle Athari, impressionist and actor James Austin Johnson, and surrealist comedian Sarah Sherman. Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang, who were both hired as featured players for season 45, were promoted to repertory status this season, while Andrew Dismukes and Punkie Johnson, both of whom were hired for season 46, remained as featured players. With 21 cast members, the cast for season 47 was the largest in the show's history.

Kate McKinnon did not appear in the first seven episodes of the season, as she was filming Joe vs. Carole. Cecily Strong was absent from the first three episodes of 2022 due to her appearance in the Off-Broadway revival of the one-woman play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Pete Davidson was absent from the thirteenth until the twentieth episode due to filming the movie The Home.

This was the final season for longtime cast members McKinnon (who had been with the show since 2012), Aidy Bryant (since 2012), Kyle Mooney (since 2013), Davidson (since 2014), Alex Moffat, Melissa Villaseñor, (both since 2016), Chris Redd (since 2017), and the only season for Athari.

This cast stayed on longer than usual (with an average of 8–10 years), compared to previous casts, and executive producer Lorne Michaels attributed this to the COVID-19 pandemic, since there was nowhere for the cast to go at the time, and that several of them would've left earlier had the pandemic not happened. Bryant and McKinnon have confirmed that this was the case for themselves specifically.

This was also the final season for longtime director Don Roy King, who had directed the show since 2006. King retired after the ninth episode, hosted by Paul Rudd, and was succeeded by Liz Patrick, a longtime director of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. In addition, longtime producer Lindsay Shookus, who had been with the show since 2002, left at the end of this season.

This season saw the deaths of four former cast members; on September 14, 2021, a month before the season began, former cast member and Weekend Update anchor Norm Macdonald died at the age of 61 after a nine-year battle with leukemia. Two months later, on November 6, former featured player from season 5 Peter Aykroyd died at the age of 65 from sepsis caused by an untreated abdominal hernia. Later in the season, on April 12, 2022, at the age of 67, season six cast member Gilbert Gottfried died after a long illness from a rare ventricular tachycardia disorder complicated by type II myotonic dystrophy. On May 6, short-lived season 11 cast member Dan Vitale died from heart disease at the age of 66.