The red-billed starling 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] The specific epithet sericeus is Medieval Latin meaning "silken".

[4] Gmelin based his account on the "silk starling" from China that had been described and illustrated in 1776 by the English naturalist Peter Brown from a specimen owned by the collector Marmaduke Tunstall.

A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2008 found that the genus was polyphyletic.

[6] In the reoganization to create monotypic genera, the red-billed starling and the white-cheeked starling were moved to the resurrected genus Spodiopsar that had been introduced in 1889 by Richard Bowdler Sharpe.