Abstract Profile monitoring in statistical quality control has attracted attention of many researchers recently. A profile is a function between response variables and one or more independent variables. There have been only a limited number of researches on monitoring multivariate profiles. Indeed, monitoring correlated multivariate profiles is a new subject in the fileld of statistical process control. In this paper, we investigate the effect of autocorrlation in monitoring multivariate linear profiles in phase II. The effect of three main models namely AR(1), MA(1), and ARMA(1,1) on the methods of multivariate linear profile monitoring is evaluated and compared by using simulation study and average run length criteria. Results indicate that autocorrelation affects performance of the existing methods significantly.