Colophons in various manuscripts state that Walter Hilton died as a canon of the Augustinian priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire on the Eve of the Annunciation (24 March) 1396. There is also a manuscript tradition that he was an Inceptor in canon law (i.e. he qualified for the doctorate, but had not actually taken it). A Walter Hilton, Bachelor of Civil Law, is recorded at the Ely Consistory Court in 1375, and Hilton may have been linked with Cambridge and Ely circles while Thomas Arundel was Bishop of Ely (1374–88). A Walter Hilton, B.C.L., was granted the reservation of a canonry and prebend of Abergwili, Carmarthen, on 28 January 1371. To have graduated by 1370, he would have gone up to Cambridge by 1357, having therefore been born before 1343.

Little is otherwise known of Hilton's life, beyond some allusions in his Latin epistles, which address a number of themes also pursued in his English works. In probably his earliest extant work, De Imagine Peccati (On the Image of Sin), Hilton writes as one solitary to another, admitting to his own lack of fulfilment in the solitary life, and beginning that theme of the renewal of the imago Dei that he is to sustain through his writings. De Utilitate et Prerogativis Religionis (On the Usefulness and Prerogatives of Religion) is a letter to Adam Horsley, an Exchequer official appointed Controller of the Great Roll in 1375, who joined the Charterhouse of Beauvale in 1386.