With the world\'s fossil fuels being finite in nature, an increasing interest focuses on the application of alternative renew-able resources such as biomass. Biomass-derived platform chemicals with abundant functional groups have the potential to replace bulk chemicals for the production of value-added chemicals, fuels, and materials. The upgrading of these platform chemicals relies on the development of efficient catalytic systems. Hydrotalcite, with its wide compositional variety, tune-able anion-exchange capacity, and controlled acidity/basicity sites demonstrates great potential in the catalytic upgrading of biomass and the derived platform chemicals. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of research achievements on the development of efficient and robust hydrotalcite-derived metal catalysts and their applications in the upgrading of biomass or the derived platform chemicals. In this review, we aim to summarize the recent advances on the catalytic upgrading of biomass-derived platform chemicals (e.g., furfural, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, levulinic acid, and glycerol) via hydrotalcite-derived metal catalysts. We also observed that the crucial role of using hydrotalcite-derived catalysts relies on their strong metal–support interactions. As a result, a section focusing on the discussion of the metal–support interactions of hydrotalcite-derived catalysts was provided.