On February 1997 the experiment was approved conditionally by  CERN and the final Memorandum of Understanding was signed in September 1998. The spectrometer was installed in 1999 - 2000 and was commissioned during a technical run in 2001. Data taking started in summer 2002 and continued until fall 2004. After one year shutdown in 2005, COMPASS resumed data taking with a muon beam in 2006 and 2007. The years 2008 and 2009 were dedicated to the COMPASS hadron spectroscopy programme with pion and proton beam. In 2010 and 2011 spin structure function measurements with a polarised proton target were performed.

In 2010 an extension of the COMPASS program has been approved by the CERN Research Board. It consists in a set of measurements to study the structure of hadrons in Deep Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS), Hard Exclusive Meson Production (HEMP), SIDIS, Polarized Drell-Yan and Primakoff reactions. Further investigations in the field of hadron spectroscopy were envisaged as well. On January 2013 a new Memorandum of Understanding was signed, in order to fulfill this program. In 2012 the data to study the Primakoff reaction were taken. The first (pilot) run for the DVCS measurement was also achieved.

Nearly 220 physicists from 13 countries and 24 institutions work in COMPASS.