It is a resident breeder in much of the western and central regions of southern Africa and has been introduced to Ascension and St Helena islands.

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

[4] Gmelin based his account on the "Le Gros-bec jaune du Cap de Bonne Espérance" that had been described and illustrated in 1760 by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson.

[6] In the reorganisation to create monophyletic genera, Serinus was split and a number of species including the yellow canary were moved to the resurrected genus Crithagra that had originally been introduced in 1827 by the English ornithologist William Swainson.

The female has grey-brown upperparts, black wings with yellow flight feathers, and a pale supercilium.