[2][3] The yellow-breasted crake was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1781 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

[4] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-colored plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.

[5] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Rallus flaviventer in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

The South American Classification Committee of AOS retains it in genus Porzana after rejecting Laterallus but is seeking a proposal to move it to Hapalocrex.

Their generally buffy face has a dark line through the eye and a pale buff-white supercilium, a pattern unique among New World members of Rallidae.

[14] The five subspecies of yellow-breasted crake are found thus:[2][14] Undocumented sight records in Ecuador lead the South American Classification Committee (SACC) of the AOS to call the species hypothetical in that country.

At some locations in Colombia it is present only from March to July, and in Costa Rica it appears to make local movements as water levels change.

The yellow-breasted crake has at least three vocalizations, a "[l]ow, harsh, rolled or churring 'k'kuk kurr-kurr'", a "plaintive, squealing, single or repeated 'kreer' or 'krreh'", and a "high-pitched, whistled 'peep'.