Progressive electronic dance music (often referred to as just progressive) usually refers to differentiate various offshoot styles of electronic dance music from their parent styles, which include trance music, house music, breakbeat and GRP fusion.

Most electronic dance music tracks released today contain features that are relatively easy for DJs to beatmatch records together, partly for that reason. Unlike the song structures of genres like hard house or Hi-NRG, the peaks and troughs in a progressive dance track tend to be more complex. Layering different sounds on top of each other and slowly bringing them in and out is key to the progressive movement.

While the term "progressive" had been used to describe jazz and rock artists such as Pink Floyd, Return to Forever or King Crimson since the late 1960s, it only started to be applied to dance music in the early- to mid- 1980s during the rise of the Chicago house and Detroit techno movements to describe what was believed to be the future of pop.

Today, the term "progressive" in dance music has come to refer to the structure of a track with more gradual changes, though there are other uses for the term: progressive trance usually refers to a type of trance music that features a less prominent lead melody and focuses more on atmosphere, and in the case of progressive house, the term "progressive" can also refer to the style's willingness to bring in new elements to the genre. These elements can be a variety of sounds, such as a guitar loop, computer generated noises, or other elements typical of other genres.