Noasaurus was named by Bonaparte and Powell (1980). It is the type genus of Noasauridae, Noasaurinae.

It was assigned to Coeluridae by Molnar (1980); to Coelurosauridae by Bonaparte (1984); to Theropoda by Carroll (1988); to Neoceratosauria by Novas (1991); to Abelisauria by Novas (1992), Novas (1997) and Novas (1997); to Ceratosauroidea by Sampson et al. (1998); to Abelisauridae by Rowe et al. (1997), Sereno (1997) and Rauhut (2003); to Abelisauroidea by Lamanna et al. (2002), Carrano et al. (2002), Salgado et al. (2009) and Ezcurra et al. (2010); to Noasauridae by Bonaparte and Powell (1980), Bonaparte et al. (1990), Bonaparte (1991), Bonaparte (1996), Coria and Salgado (2000), Agnolín et al. (2003), Sereno et al. (2004), Tykoski and Rowe (2004), Novas et al. (2004), Carrano et al. (2004), Candeiro and Martinelli (2005), Novas et al. (2006), Coria et al. (2006), Carrano and Sampson (2008), Agnolin and Chiarelli (2010), Carrano et al. (2011), Novas et al. (2013), Furtado et al. (2013), Hendrickx and Mateus (2014), Tortosa et al. (2014), Allain et al. (2014) and Gianechini et al. (2015); and to Noasaurinae by Paul (1988), Rauhut and Carrano (2016) and Delcourt (2018).