Background: Timely access to cardiovascular procedures and specialist care is clinically important, yet methods used to establish wait-time benchmarks are not well characterized. This systematic review aims to identify, characterize, and critically appraise methods used to derive wait-time benchmarks for cardiovascular procedures and specialist cardiovascular care. It will assess whether benchmarks are supported by empirical outcome data, developed through transparent consensus processes, and informed by patient-specific risk stratification. It will also examine associations between waiting duration and outcomes and whether methods from other specialties are transferable to cardiovascular care. Methods: This systematic review will include adults awaiting cardiovascular procedures or specialist care and studies from other specialties describing transferable benchmark-development methods. Eligible sources will include guidelines, consensus statements, policy documents, health technology assessments, empirical studies, systematic reviews, and reports describing benchmark derivation, justification, or validation. MEDLINE, PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, guideline repositories, health technology assessment databases, government and professional society websites, and grey literature will be searched from inception to the final search date, without language restrictions. Two reviewers will independently screen records, extract data, and assess quality, with disagreements resolved by consensus or a third reviewer. Primary outcomes will include derivation method, evidentiary basis, consensusprocess characteristics, benchmark structure, and associations between waiting duration and outcomes. Secondary outcomes will include methodological quality, clinical validation, implementation, practice concordance, stakeholder involvement, benchmark updating, and geographic and temporal variation. Findings will be synthesized narratively using descriptive statistics, summary tables, and evidence maps. Meta-analysis may be undertaken if at least three sufficiently homogeneous studies are available. Discussion: This review will clarify how cardiovascular wait-time benchmarks have been developed and validated, identify methodological gaps, and assess the transferability of approaches from other specialties. The findings may inform more transparent, evidence-based, risk-sensitive, and clinically meaningful wait-time benchmarks. Ethics approval and patient consent are not required because the review will use publicly available literature and documents. Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publication, conference presentations, and engagement with cardiovascular and health-policy stakeholders.