The propagation of polychromatic electromagnetic Gaussian Schell-model (EGSM) beams in free space is investigated. It is shown that the spectral degree of polarization, spectral degree of coherence, and normalized spectrum change generally on propagation. The conditions of keeping the spectral invariance and keeping polarization invariance for the polychromatic EGSM beams are derived respectively. The results indicate that the constraints on the parameters of EGSM source to keep polarization invariance on propagation are more rigorous than those to keep invariance of the normalized spectrum.