The family has a cosmopolitan distribution across the world, absent only from the densest forests of central Africa, some remote oceanic islands, the high Arctic and Antarctica.

[2] Falcons and caracaras are carnivores, feeding on birds, small mammals including bats,[3] reptiles, insects and carrion.

In popular imagination the falconids are fast flying predators, and while this is true of the genus Falco and some falconets, other species, particularly the caracaras, are more sedentary in their feeding.

Some species are specialists, such as the laughing falcon, which specialises in snakes, and the red-throated caracara, which mainly feeds on the larvae of bees and wasps; others are more generalist in their diet.

[5] They are monogamous, although some caracaras may also employ alloparenting strategies, where younger birds help adults (usually their parents) in raising the next brood of chicks.

The family Falconidae was introduced by the English zoologist William Elford Leach in a guide to the contents of the British Museum published in 1819.

[10][12] The following cladogram is based on a comprehensive molecular phylogenetic study of the Falconidae by Jérôme Fuchs and collaborators that was published in 2015.

The number of species is taken from the list of birds maintained by Frank Gill, Pamela Rasmussen and David Donsker on behalf of the International Ornithological Committee (IOC).

[13][14] Fuchs and collaborators recommended that the genus Daptrius should be expanded to include the genera Phalcoboenus and Milvago due to the shallow genetic divergence.