Members are halophiles and can be chemoorganotrophs or heterotrophs and are isolated from high-salt environments such as marine solar salterns and the Dead Sea.

[4] Members of this order was demarcated from the class Halobacteria, previously a large phylogenetically unrelated group of species with distinct biochemical characteristics and different ecological niches.

[5][6] The diverse range of morphological and physiological characteristics made it difficult to clarify the evolutionary relationship within the class beyond a genus level.

In 2015, Gupta et al. proposed the division of the class Halobacteria into the orders Halobacteriales, Haloferacales and Natrialbales based on comparative genomic analyses and the branching pattern of various phylogenetic trees constructed from several different datasets of conserved proteins and 16S rRNA sequences.

The currently accepted taxonomy is based on the List of Prokaryotic names with Standing in Nomenclature (LPSN)[2] and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).