This work reports experimental measurements and a modelling study carried out on palladium and platinum based catalytic monoliths used as methane combustors for heating purposes. It concentrates on the effects of operating conditions on combustion, heat transfer efficiency and pollutant formation. The development of a detailed homogeneous/heterogeneous chemical kinetics model for methane-air combustion over palladium using literature data was undertaken to model the behaviour of one of the experimental catalytic heaters. In addition, a published detailed chemical mechanism for methane combustion over platinum was used in the platinum catalyst model. The fuel-air equivalence ratios ranged from 0.3 to 0.6 and the space velocities used were between 24 000 and 72 000 h(-1). Although the model assumed perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) conditions and was applied to localised regions of the monoliths where little radial gradients of temperature and concentrations were measured, it predicted the surface temperature, methane slippage, CO and NOx at the downstream face of the monolith with reasonable accuracy in some cases, but also highlighted the shortcomings of the PSR assumption in other cases.