The banded martin was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected from the Cape of Good Hope.

[2] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.

[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Hirundo cincta in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

[8] Five subspecies are recognised:[6] The 15–17 cm (5.9–6.7 in) long banded martin has earth-brown upper parts, except for a white stripe above the eye.

Its nest is at the end of a 60–90 cm (24–35 in) long tunnel usually excavated by the birds in a natural sand bank or earth mound.