The species is endemic to Asia and occurs from India and Sri Lanka east to Indonesia and the Philippines (where it is called mayang pakíng).

In 1743 the English naturalist George Edwards included an illustration and a description of the scaly-breasted munia in the first volume of his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds.

Edwards based his hand-coloured etching on a specimen at the London home of Charles du Bois, treasurer to the East India Company.

[2] When in 1758 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the tenth edition, he placed the scaly-breasted munia with the crossbills in the genus Loxia.

Linnaeus included a brief description, coined the binomial name Loxia punctulata and cited Edwards' work.

Other populations include subundulata from the eastern Himalayas, yunnanensis of southern China, topela of Thailand, cabanisi of the Philippines and fretensis of Singapore and Sumatra.

In Pakistan, they are restricted to a narrow region from Swat in the west to Lahore, avoiding the desert zone, and then occurring again in India east of an area between Ludhiana and Mount Abu.

Escaped cage-birds established in the wild and such populations have been recorded in the West Indies (Puerto Rico since 1971),[16] Hawaii (since 1883[17]),[18] Japan[19] and southern United States, mainly in Florida and California.

[18] The species has been introduced to other parts of the world due to its popularity as a cage bird and populations have established in the wild.

Individuals communicate with calls that include a short whistle, variations of kitty-kitty-kitty, and a sharp chipping alarm note.

[11][23] The nest is a large domed structure loosely woven from blades of grass, bamboo or other leaves with a side entrance and is placed in a tree or under the eaves of a house.

A study in southern India found the preferred nesting trees to be Toddalia asiatica, Gymnosporia montana and Acacia chundra, especially short and bushy ones in areas with low canopy cover.

[26] In northern India, they preferred isolated Acacia nilotica in non-urban areas but used Thuja orientalis and Polyalthia longifolia in urban gardens.

[30] Although the bill is suited for crushing small grains, they do not show lateral movements of the lower mandible which help European greenfinches in dehusking seeds.

Feeding behavior can be predicted by the optimal foraging theory, where animals minimize time and energy spent to maximize food intake.

[33] Studies on foraging have examined the effect of group size in reducing time spent on predator vigilance, thereby increasing feeding efficiency.

These models are based on hypotheses that differ in the degree of compatibility that is assumed between the two food and joining opportunity search modes.

When the seed distribution made the scrounger tactic unprofitable, the frequency of hopping with the head up diminished and appears to support the predictions of the producer-scrounger model.

[40] Studies show that scaly-breasted munias tend to adopt the scrounger tactic when food is more clumped and when the group size increases.

It has been suggested that individuals that play scrounger could also, by virtue of their head position, be alert for predators and hence contribute to antipredatory vigilance.

When individuals are free to choose between producer and scrounger, frequency dependent selection results in a stable mixture of both behaviors where each receives similar payoff.

Studies indicate that if most of the population consists of producers, then scrounging behavior is favored by natural selection because there is plenty of food to steal.

[43][44] Three hypotheses might account for consistent foraging specializations across individuals: food source variation, phenotypic differences, and frequency dependent-choice.

[46] Furthermore, foraging birds may feed actively on the substrate or pick grains dropped on the ground and these strategies may be chosen according to the situation.

[49] Recent models of economic defence in a group-foraging context predict that the frequency of aggressive interactions should decline as resource density increases.

When food location was signaled, increasing patch density resulted in the predicted decrease in the number of aggressive encounters.

[55] In Southeast Asia, the scaly-breasted munia is trapped in large numbers for Buddhist life release rituals.