In this paper, we mainly investigate the well-posedness of the four-order degenerate differential equation ( $P_4$ ): $(Mu)''''(t) + \alpha (Lu)'''(t) + (Lu)''(t)$ $=\beta Au(t) + \gamma Bu'(t) + Gu'_t + Fu_t + f(t),\,( t\in [0,\,2\pi ])$ in periodic Lebesgue–Bochner spaces $L^p(\mathbb {T}; X)$ and periodic Besov spaces $B_{p,q}^s\;(\mathbb {T}; X)$ , where $A$ , $B$ , $L$ and $M$ are closed linear operators on a Banach space $X$ such that $D(A)\cap D(B)\subset D(M)\cap D(L)$ and $\alpha,\,\beta,\,\gamma \in \mathbb {C}$ , $G$ and $F$ are bounded linear operators from $L^p([-2\pi,\,0];X)$ (respectively $B_{p,q}^s([-2\pi,\,0];X)$ ) into $X$ , $u_t(\cdot ) = u(t+\cdot )$ and $u'_t(\cdot ) = u'(t+\cdot )$ are defined on $[-2\pi,\,0]$ for $t\in [0,\, 2\pi ]$ . We completely characterize the well-posedness of ( $P_4$ ) in the above two function spaces by using known operator-valued Fourier multiplier theorems.