An evergreen shrub, it occurs on the south coast of Western Australia between Albany and Israelite Bay, where it is a common plant.

A many-branched bush with wedge-shaped serrated leaves and large golden-yellow flower spikes, known as inflorescences, it grows up to 10 metres (30 ft) high.

In cultivation, Banksia media grows well in a sunny location on well-drained soil in areas with dry summers.

Conversely, some coastal populations such as at Point Ann have plants with a prostrate habit with the flower spikes towering above the foliage.

[3] Leaf dimensions vary in different populations: plants from the western and coastal parts of its range have shorter and broader leaves—4 to 6 cm by 1 to 2 cm, while inland plants from around Mt Charles and Mt Ragged have longer and narrower leaves and less revolute leaf margins.

[2] Robert Brown described Banksia media in his 1830 supplement to his Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen, the type specimen having been collected between Cape Arid and Lucky Bay by collector William Baxter in 1824.

[6] This application of the principle of priority was largely ignored by Kuntze's contemporaries,[7] and Banksia L.f. was formally conserved and Sirmuellera rejected in 1940.

[9] In 1996, Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges published the results of a cladistic analysis of morphological characters of Banksia.

Cyrtostylis was found to be "widely polyphyletic", as six of the fourteen taxa in that series occurred singly in locations throughout Thiele and Ladiges' cladogram.

The remaining eight formed a clade that further resolved into two subclades, with B. media appeared in one of them, alongside praemorsa, epica and pilostylis:[10] Since 1998, Austin Mast has been publishing results of ongoing cladistic analyses of DNA sequence data for the subtribe Banksiinae.

[14] Banksia media is widely distributed across southern Western Australia, from the eastern border of Stirling Range National Park across to Israelite Bay and extending northwards to Pingrup, Frank Hann National Park, 15 km east northeast of Dowak and 35 km northwest of Mt Buraminya.