It has smooth mottled grey or brownish bark, sometimes with rough bark near the base, linear to curved adult leaves, flower buds usually in groups of seven and eleven, creamy white flowers and hemispherical to flattened spherical fruit.Eucalyptus leptopoda is a mallee, or occasionally a tree, that typically grows to a height of 1 to 8 metres (3 to 26 ft) and forms a lignotuber.

Young plants and coppice regrowth have leaves that are arranged alternately, dull greenish, linear to narrow lance-shaped, 50–130 mm (2.0–5.1 in) long and 4–10 mm (0.16–0.39 in) wide on a short petiole.

[2][4][5] Eucalyptus leptopoda was first formally described by the botanist George Bentham in 1867 and published in Flora Australiensis.

[4][8] In 1992, Lawrie Johnson and Ken Hill described four subspecies and the names have been accepted by the Australian Plant Census:[9] The Tammin mallee is endemic to the Mid West, Wheatbelt and western parts of the Goldfields-Esperance regions in Western Australia where it is commonly found on sand plains, dunes and rises growing in sandy or loamy soils sometimes containing gravel, over and around areas of laterite.

[2] All four subspecies of E. leptopoda are classified as "not threatened" by the Western Australian Government Department of Parks and Wildlife.