Alternative transportation fuels are critically required nowadays due to environmental concerns related to the rising of greenhouse gas emissions and the depletion of petroleum reserves. In this regard, advanced biofuels, commonly known as a second-generation biofuel, are gaining attention as promising candidates to replace the high polluting conventional transportation fuels or to fulfill drop-in fuel specifications. Abundant biomass coming from forest residues has been recently processed applying HydrofactionTM, which is a hydrothermal liquefaction technology to produce renewable biocrude. Even though it is a high-quality biocrude compared with other second-generation biofuels, an upgrading step is required, and the catalytic hydrotreating technology was selected for this investigation. Reduction of oxygen content, acidity and viscosity of HydrofactionTM biocrude are the primary goals in this study. Two independent hydrotreating campaigns were accomplished to study the effect of operational conditions during the upgrading of renewable HydrofactionTM biocrudes in the presence of commercial hydrotreating catalysts. In both campaigns, the performance of the catalysts over time was studied as well as the thermal effects on the upgrading of biocrudes; it was accomplished by performing experiments in the bench hydrotreater pilot plant without catalysts. After performing experiments using two downflow reactors packed with commercial NiMo catalysts, promising results were achieved. The oxygen content of the upgraded sample was removed, the total acid number was reduced to 0.06 mgKOH/g oil (99.9%), the viscosity was decreased to 6 cP (99.5%), the H/C molar ratio was highly improved to 1.71 as well as the heating value up to 43.7 MJ/kg. The baseline for comparison was the initial properties of the biocrude. After upgrading, a highly improved distillation curve obtained from gas chromatography, high temperature simulated distillation) showed low vacuum residue fraction (>550 o C) around 5%, and improved diesel fraction around 50% in the range 190 to 343 °C were obtained positioning this upgraded biocrude as a potential pathway for transportation fuels production. Finally, the insights of this research will allow the establishment of optimal operative conditions for upgrading renewable biocrudes generated from woody residues.