When Rose met the Doctor in Rose, she was working as a shop assistant at Henrik's department store in Regent Street, London. She also had a boyfriend named Mickey Smith and lived in a council flat with her mother Jackie. Rose left school without taking her A-levels but did win the bronze medal in an under-sevens gymnastics competition at her junior school. Her father, Pete Tyler, died in 1987 in a car accident, the year after Rose was born.

One night after the shop closed she encountered mannequins coming to life in the basement of the building. The Autons were about to dispose of her when the Doctor saved her life, although he went on to destroy the building in the process, depriving Rose of her job. She went on to aid the Doctor in tracking down the hiding place of the Nestene Consciousness that was animating the Autons and subsequently helped defeat its plans of world conquest. She then joined the Doctor on his travels in the TARDIS.

In her travels with the Doctor, Rose (among other things) saw the end of the world, encountered the Doctor's oldest enemy and learned about the consequences of tampering with history. The Doctor even modified her mobile phone to be able to communicate across time and space, among other functions. She nicknamed it the "Superphone".

During the 2005 series, the words "Bad Wolf" followed the Doctor and Rose around, the phrase being scattered like clues through the places that they visited. In The Parting of the Ways, it was revealed that Rose was the Bad Wolf — the words were a message that she had left to herself in time and space when she absorbed the energies of the time vortex to save the Doctor and the Earth from the Daleks. The Doctor had just returned her home to place her out of harm's way, but "Bad Wolf" was a reminder that it was possible to get back to him. This led her to the point where she would absorb the energies, creating a predestination paradox and making it possible not just to destroy the Daleks but to leave those clues.

However, the energies she absorbed were destroying her body. The Doctor took those energies into himself, sacrificing his ninth incarnation and regenerating before Rose's eyes into the Tenth Doctor.

Rose was initially disconcerted at the Doctor's transformation, and was even more distressed when the Doctor fell into a post-regenerative coma, unable to stop the threat of a Sycorax invasion. However, when the Doctor recovered and defeated the Sycorax, Rose happily accepted his new face and manner (The Christmas Invasion).

In Tooth and Claw she was made a dame by Queen Victoria, making her Dame Rose of the Powell Estate. Immediately afterwards, however, Victoria banished the two from the British Empire. When the Doctor, Rose and Mickey accidentally travelled to a parallel Earth, Rose met an alternate version of her father, Pete Tyler, who had become a success (Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel). At the end of that story, Mickey elected to stay on that parallel Earth to fight their Cybermen and Rose thought she would never see him again.

However, in the 2006 series finale, Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, the Cybermen managed to invade Rose's universe along with the Daleks. Although Rose and the Doctor managed to remove both enemies from Earth, Rose ended up being trapped on the parallel Earth, albeit reunited with Pete, Mickey and Jackie, who had also followed. The Doctor managed to send one last signal through the cracks between universes, sharing a tearful farewell with her. He told Rose that she had been declared dead in the invasion. Rose in turn revealed that she was working for that universe's version of the Torchwood Institute due to her experience with aliens.