The Magellanic tapaculo was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[2][3] Gmelin based his description on the "Magellanic warbler" that had been described in 1783 by the English ornithologist John Latham in his A General Synopsis of Birds.

[4] The naturalist Joseph Banks had provided Latham with a water-colour drawing of the bird by Georg Forster who had accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean.

[6] The species was often known as the Andean tapaculo in the past and included a number of subspecies distributed along the Andes.

[7] Its range extends northwards from Tierra del Fuego as far as Valparaíso Region in Chile and San Juan Province in Argentina.