This paper is concerned with the global existence and time-asymptotic behavior of solutions to the three dimensional complete electromagnetic fluid system (or Maxwell–Navier–Stokes equations) for viscous compressible fluids. The global classical solution is established when the initial data are small perturbations of some given constant state. Moreover, the optimal decay estimates of the solution in Lq with 2≤q≤6 and its higher-order spatial derivatives in L2 are also obtained.