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The first semi-professional ultimate league was the American Ultimate Disc League, or AUDL, now called the Ultimate Frisbee Association (UFA). Devised in 2009 by Nebraska native Josh Moore, the AUDL took flight in April of 2012 with a game between the Rhode Island Rampage and Connecticut Constitution. By the end of the year, however, the league was on the verge of falling apart. An owner of the 2012 AUDL champion Philadelphia Spinners, Jeff Snader, decided to leave the league and take his team with him to start a rival league, Major League Ultimate (MLU).

Franchises within the AUDL came and went while the MLU looked like the better league with teams on the East and West Coast. But time proved to be on the AUDL’s side as their franchise model outlasted the MLU’s corporate ownership model. The MLU lost talent, spent too much money and folded in 2017.

Around this time a professional ultimate league playing mixed gender started with the Australia Ultimate League (AUL) featuring the Sydney Suns, Brisbane Breakers, Melbourne Flames, Perth Power, Canberra Freeze and Adelaide Dragons. The Sydney Suns won the 2019 AUL before the league folded during the pandemic in 2020.

After a gender equity movement spurred by larger social currents pushed back against the AUDL’s male-centered league with a boycott, several subset professional women’s teams formed in the late 2010s including teams in Seattle, San Francisco, Nashville, Detroit, Raleigh, Nashville, Austin, Indianapolis and Atlanta. In 2018 the women’s and non-binary professional Premier Ultimate League (PUL) was formed with the first season beginning in the spring of 2019 featuring eight teams, seven in the United States plus the Medellin Revolution from Colombia.

In 2020 the women's and non-binary Western Ultimate League (WUL), operating in solidarity with the PUL, formed with seven teams. Their first season on the field began in 2021. As of this writing in February 2025 there are seven WUL teams, eleven PUL teams and twenty-four UFA teams. Pilot professional leagues have also existed in Colombia and Europe as well as semi-professional seasonal touring teams such as Bex Forth’s Eurostars Tour, Qxhna Titcomb’s All-Star Ultimate Tour, Kevin Minderhout’s NexGen series and the Black Widows Tour.

Notably, the professional leagues have experimented with different discs outside of the 30-year dominance of the Discraft Ultra-Star. The MLU used an Innova Pulsar for two seasons while the UFA bought the mold for the 175g Aria Disc and rebranded it as a Wham-O Frisbee, now manufactured by Prodigy Discs. The Professional Ultimate Frisbee disc was first used during the 2024 season.