In his 1838 work Epicrisis Systematis Mycologici seu Synopsis Hymenomycetum, Elias Magnus Fries introduced the "Polyporei".

[1] American mycologist William Alphonso Murrill, in a series of publications in the early 1900s, classified the polypores into a more organized family of 78 genera, including 29 that were monotypic, and 39 that were new to science.

[4] Around the same time as Murrill, Curtis Gates Lloyd devoted considerable effort in sorting polypore taxonomy, and amassed a large and diverse collection of fruit bodies from around the world.

[6] Several works contributing to the systematics of the Polyporaceae were published in the following decades, including Marinus Anton Donk (1960, 1964),[7][8] Gordon Heriot Cunningham (1965),[9] and David Pegler (1973).

[10] As of April 2018[update], Index Fungorum accepts 114 genera and 1621 species in the Polyporaceae:[11] In a proposed family-level classification of the Polyporales based on molecular phylogenetics, Alfredo Justo and colleagues propose synonymizing the Ganodermataceae with the Polyporaceae, and accept 44 genera in this family: Abundisporus, Amauroderma, Cerarioporia, Colospora, Cryptoporus, Datronia, Datroniella, Dendrodontia, Dentocorticium, Dichomitus, Donkioporia, Earliella, Echinochaete, Epithele, Favolus, Fomes, Fomitella, Ganoderma, Grammothele, Grammothelopsis, Hexagonia, Haploporus, Hornodermoporus, Lentinus, Lignosus, Lopharia, Megasporia, Megasporoporia, Melanoderma, Microporellus, Microporus, Neodatronia, Neofavolus, Pachykytospora, Perenniporia, Perenniporiella, Pseudofavolus, Pyrofomes, Tinctoporellus, Tomophagus, Trametes, Truncospora, Vanderbylia, and Yuchengia.