Spinosauridae was named by Stromer (1915).

It was assigned to Goniopoda by Matthew and Brown (1922); to Megalosauria by Nopcsa (1923); to Carnosauria by Huene (1927); to Carnosauria by Kuhn (1946); to Deinodontoidea by Tatarinov (1964); to Tyrannosauroidea by Walker (1964), Kuhn (1966), Charig (1967); to Theropoda by Stromer (1915), Stromer (1934), Barsbold (1983), Carroll (1988); to Ceratosauria by Paul (1988); to Carnosauria by Huene (1926), Stromer (1934), Roxo (1937), Huene (1948), Romer (1966), Colbert and Russell (1969), Steel (1970), Bonaparte (1978), Bonaparte (1980), Kurzanov (1989); to Theropoda by Molnar (1992); to Torvosauroidea by Sereno et al. (1994); to Spinosauroidea by Sereno et al. (1996), Milner (1997), Sereno (1998), Sereno et al. (1998), Sereno (1999), Sues et al. (2002), Holtz et al. (2004), Yates (2005), Dal Sasso et al. (2005), Medeiros (2006), Sánchez-Hernández et al. (2007), Sadleir et al. (2008); to Tetanurae by Holtz (1996), Sereno (1997), Holtz (2000), Bittencourt and Langer (2011), Allain et al. (2012); to Megalosauria by Carrano et al. (2012); to Theropoda by Lull (1924), Tong et al. (2019); and to Megalosauroidea by Maleev (1968), Hanson and Makovicky (2013), Hendrickx and Mateus (2014), Rauhut et al. (2016), Sharma et al. (2023).