For most of its history the institution was scattered. In 1961 it acquired its Corstorphine campus by buying a portion of the Clermiston estate from developers, occupying it from 1970. The opening ceremony was conducted by Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, who had been Patron of the school since 1940 and remained so until her death. Other campuses opened in Leith and at the Gateway Theatre on Elm Row - a former Scottish Television studio that had become the home of the university's drama school. In 2007 and 2008 the university pulled all three campuses together at a new purpose-built site near Musselburgh in East Lothian. The £100 million development transformed 35 acres of low-grade farmland into a landscaped parkland campus, and was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 4 July 2008. It has been described as the greenest university campus in the country - designed by Dyer Architects to exceed environmental standards then in force, and winner of Scottish Green Awards gold in 2010.

The School of Health Sciences offers the widest range of professional healthcare courses of any university in Scotland - dietetics, nursing, paramedic science, speech and language therapy, audiology, occupational therapy, art therapy, physiotherapy, podiatry, radiography. The 2024 Guardian University rankings placed the BSc Paramedic Science course top in the UK and the nursing programme sixth. The Speech and Hearing Sciences department won a Queen's Anniversary Prize for research into the clinical applications of speech technology - work carried out at the Speech Science Research Centre. The other school, Arts, Social Sciences and Management, contains the drama programmes that grew from the old Gateway Theatre. The Guardian's 2024 rankings placed QMU drama in the UK top ten and named it Scotland's leading place to train in drama. The university quietly celebrated fifty years of professional drama training in 2021. It is also the only institution in Scotland accredited by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations to deliver the postgraduate CIPR Diploma.

Prue Leith became Chancellor in October 2016, succeeding Sir Tom Farmer. The restaurateur and Great British Bake Off judge brought a kind of full-circle moment to a school whose original mission included teaching nutrition. Sir Paul Grice became Principal in 2019. He was knighted in 2016 for services to the Scottish Parliament, having previously served as Chief Executive and Clerk of the Scottish Parliament. He succeeded Petra Wend, who had read Italian, French and Education at the University of Münster in Germany before moving through a series of UK university posts and arriving at Queen Margaret in 2009. The university is small by Scottish standards but distinctive - a specialist in subjects others overlook, still recognisably the descendant of an institution founded to teach women practical things that mattered.