The spot-breasted woodpecker was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana.
The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle, which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.
 Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name, but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Picus punctigula in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.
For many years, the spot-breasted woodpecker was placed in the genus Chrysoptilus, but it is now placed in the genus  Colaptes that was introduced by the Irish zoologist Nicholas Aylward Vigors in 1825.
The generic name is from the Ancient Greek kolaptēs meaning "chiseller".
The specific epithet punctigula combines the Latin punctum meaning "spot" and gula meaning "throat".

Six subspecies are recognised:
C. p. ujhelyii (Madarász, 1912) – eastern Panama to northern Colombia
C. p. striatigularis (Chapman, 1914) – west-central Colombia
C. p. punctipectus (Cabanis & Heine, 1863) – eastern Colombia and Venezuela
C. p. zuliae (Cory, 1915) – northwestern Venezuela
C. p. punctigula (Boddaert, 1783) – the Guianas
C. p. guttatus (von Spix, 1824) – Upper Amazonia
The spot-breasted woodpecker was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle, which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.  Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name, but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Picus punctigula in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. For many years, the spot-breasted woodpecker was placed in the genus Chrysoptilus, but it is now placed in the genus  Colaptes that was introduced by the Irish zoologist Nicholas Aylward Vigors in 1825. The generic name is from the Ancient Greek kolaptēs meaning "chiseller". The specific epithet punctigula combines the Latin punctum meaning "spot" and gula meaning "throat".
Six subspecies are recognised:
C. p. ujhelyii (Madarász, 1912) – eastern Panama to northern Colombia
C. p. striatigularis (Chapman, 1914) – west-central Colombia
C. p. punctipectus (Cabanis & Heine, 1863) – eastern Colombia and Venezuela
C. p. zuliae (Cory, 1915) – northwestern Venezuela
C. p. punctigula (Boddaert, 1783) – the Guianas
C. p. guttatus (von Spix, 1824) – Upper Amazonia
Spot-breasted woodpecker