Background and purpose: Teacher professional development potentially enhances teachers' professional morale, knowledge, skills and autonomy, which helps improve the quality of education. The military medical university is an important medical education institution in China; however, studies of teacher professional development within military medical universities are still lacking. This study aimed to explore the factors that influence teacher professional development in Chinese military medical universities. Methods: We interviewed 19 experts from China's Third Military Medical University to identify factors that affect teacher professional development and used these factors to prepare a questionnaire. The data were collected through a random, anonymous questionnaire survey of 371 teachers at three military universities in China, analysed by exploratory factor analysis and verified by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results: We obtained five main factors, which explained 66.691% of the total variance and were found to have a good data fitting according to the CFA results. Conclusions: Teaching experience, shared vision, policy and material security, professional competence and psychological motivation primarily affect teacher professional development in Chinese military medical universities. We can only achieve teacher professional development goals through comprehensive consideration, coordinated arrangement and content improvement of these five factors.