Abstract This paper is devoted to investigating the boundedness, continuity and compactness for variation operators of singular integrals and their commutators on Morrey spaces and Besov spaces. More precisely, we establish the boundedness for the variation operators of singular integrals with rough kernels Ω ∈ Lq (S n−1) (q > 1) and their commutators on Morrey spaces as well as the compactness for the above commutators on Lebesgue spaces and Morrey spaces. In addition, we present a criterion on the boundedness and continuity for a class of variation operators of singular integrals and their commutators on Besov spaces. As applications, we obtain the boundedness and continuity for the variation operators of Hilbert transform, Hermit Riesz transform, Riesz transforms and rough singular integrals as well as their commutators on Besov spaces.