cunninghamii was first collected by Franz Sieber in 1823, from Mount York in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.

[7] This was a nomen nudum until the following year, when Carl Meissner republished the name with a formal description.

cunninghamii, although in 1981 Alf Salkin proposed to resurrect the name for the Victorian population, on grounds of the large distance (700 km) between forms, and some distinguishing characteristics.

[10] A final synonym, Banksia ledifolia, dates from 1856, when Meissner inexplicably listed the name as a synonym (authored by Cunningham and in manuscript form in the Herbarium) in his chapter on the Proteaceae for A. P. de Candolle's Prodromus.

[11] Banksia verae was renamed Eubanksia by Stephan Endlicher in 1847, and in Meissner's 1856 classification it was demoted to sectional rank.

[12] When George Bentham published his 1870 arrangement in Flora Australiensis, he discarded Meissner's series, placing all the species with hooked styles together in a section that he named Oncostylis.

cunninghamii's taxonomic placement may be summarised as follows:[2] Since 1998, Austin Mast has been publishing results of ongoing cladistic analyses of DNA sequence data for the subtribe Banksiinae.

[15][16][17] Early in 2007, Mast and Thiele initiated a rearrangement of Banksia by merging Dryandra into it, and publishing B. subg.

[18] To date, the National Herbarium of New South Wales continues to treat this taxon as having species rank, referring to it as B. cunninghamii.

[19] A 2013 molecular study by Marcel Cardillo and colleagues using chloroplast DNA and combining it with earlier results placed B. cunninghamii as the earliest offshoot of a lineage that gave rise to the three other subspecies of B.

[20] This taxon occurs along the coast from Melbourne, Victoria to the northern boundary of New South Wales, with large populations east of Melbourne, along the coast near the boundary of Victoria and New South Wales, and around Sydney.

There are also many records of collections of this species in mountainous areas of northern New South Wales, but these probably need to be re-classified as B. neoanglica.