The methanol to olefins (MTO) process has received considerable interest due to its importance in transforming abundant resources such as coal, natural gas, and biomass to widely-demanded light olefins. In the MTO process, the coke deposited on the catalyst governs the catalyst activity and product selectivity, and thus is critical to the reaction behaviour. In the industrial processes, the residence time and coke content of catalyst particles in the reactor show a certain distribution due to the continuous outflow of spent catalyst and inflow of regenerated catalyst, which need further attention. The multi-phase particle-in-cell (MP-PIC) approach was used in the current work to simulate the catalyst residence time and coke content distribution. The effect of gas-solid flow patterns, reactor structure, and average catalyst residence time on the residence time and coke content distribution was investigated. It was found that at high superficial velocities, the coke content distributions obtained with the MP-PIC method are consistent with the distribution deduced from the ideally mixed flow assumption of catalyst particles. The results suggested that it is possible to simulate large-scale MTO reactors by use of the coke distribution. In particular, by incorporating an initial coke distribution, the time needed to reach steady state in the MTO reactor simulations could be greatly reduced.