In this paper, we study the Joule–Thomson expansion for RN-AdS black holes immersed in perfect fluid dark matter. As perfect fluid dark matter is one of the dark matter candidates, we are interested in how it influences the thermodynamic properties of black holes. Firstly, the negative cosmological constant could be interpreted as thermodynamic pressure and its conjugate quantity as the thermodynamic volume, which give us more physical insights into the black hole. Moreover, we derive the thermodynamic definitions and study the critical behaviour of the black hole. Secondly, the explicit expression of Joule–Thomson coefficient is obtained from the basic formulas of the pressure, the volume, the entropy and the temperature. Then, we obtain the inversion curves in terms of charge Q and parameter λ. Furthermore, we analyse the isenthalpic curve in T–P graph with the cooling–heating region determined by the inversion curve. At last, we derive the ratio of minimum inversion temperature to critical temperature and compare the result with that in the RN-AdS case.