The competition was launched in 2002–03 along with the Scottish Women's Premier League, and the first winners were Kilmarnock.

[1] It supplanted the Scottish Women's Football League Cup (Kilmarnock were also its last winners) which continued as a lower-division competition.

The SWPL Cup changed to run on a summer schedule played in a single calendar year (from around March to November) from the 2009 edition[2][3] until the COVID-19 pandemic ended the 2020 season prematurely (leaving that year's edition unfinished) and caused the SWPL to revert to a winter format in all competitions for the following season, which was retained after pandemic restrictions ended.

The last edition with the straight-knockout format was the 2019 Scottish Women's Premier League Cup In a large change to the format for the 2020 edition of the Cup, a 16-team group stage was inaugurated, planned to qualify teams for the eight-team knockout phase, with the League's top two clubs given a bye to the quarter-finals; but the SWPL was abandoned early in the 2020 season, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and the League reverted to the winter format as a result.

The group phase was played with all clubs in the 2021–22 SWPL Cup,[5] which was completed and won by Celtic.