Yellow phosphorus tail gas is a resource to produce bulk chemicals, such as formate, oxalate, methanol and so on, after pretreatment and purification. In this study, catalytic oxidation of phosphorus and hydrogen sulfide in yellow phosphorus tail gas was investigated with activated carbon and a home-made catalyst KU2. Phosphorus and hydrogen sulfide adsorption characteristics on the catalysts were studied in a fixed-bed system at different temperatures between 20 and 140 ℃ under atmospheric pressure. Both KU2 and activated carbon proved to be effective catalysts in the catalytic oxidation process (COP) for H₂S and PH₃ removal. Purification efficiency increases with the increase of temperature and oxygen concentration in yellow phosphorus tail gases. Under optimized operation conditions the product gas with a content of hydrogen sulfide ＜5 mg/m³, total phosphorus＜ 5 mg/m³ was obtained by using the COP process. Spent catalysts could be restored to the original activity after several regenerations. A mathematical model was developed to simulate the experimental results and the mass transfer coefficient for the experiment was evaluated. Good agreement of the experimental breakthrough curves with the model predictions was observed.