When Rose met the Doctor in Rose, she was 19 and 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 and her job in the process. She aided 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 has (among other things) seen the end of the world, encountered the Doctor's oldest enemy and learned about the consequences of tampering with history. The Doctor even modifed her Nokia 3200 mobile phone to be able to communicate across time and space, among other functions. She has nicknamed it the "Superphone".

During her first year with the Doctor, 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.