It is found in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.

Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist shrubland, pastureland, and heavily degraded former forest.

The lined seedeater was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Loxia lineola.

[2] Linnaeus mistakenly specified the "habitat" as Asia; the type locality was subsequently designated as the state of Bahia in Brazil.

[4] The lined seedeater is now assigned to the genus Sporophila that was introduced by the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis in 1844.