Phocoenoides was named by Andrews (1911) [This is an alternate spelling of Phocoenoides.]. It is extant. Its type is Phocoenoides dalli. It was considered monophyletic by Barnes (1984).

It was synonymized subjectively with Phocaena by Simpson (1945); it was corrected as Phocaenoides by Fajardo-Mellor et al. (2006).

It was assigned to Delphininae by Scheffer and Rice (1963); to Phocoeninae by Kasuya (1973); to Phocoenoidinae by Barnes (1984), Barnes (1985), de Muizon (1988), McKenna and Bell (1997), Fordyce and de Muizon (2001); and to Phocoenidae by Barnes (1977), Jefferson (1988), Rice (1998), Mead and Brownell (2005), Fajardo-Mellor et al. (2006), Agnarsson and May-Collado (2008), Geisler et al. (2011), Colpaert et al. (2015), Marx et al. (2016).