Hadrosaurinae was named by Lambe (1918). Its type is Hadrosaurus.

It was reranked as the unranked clade Hadrosaurinae by Campione and Evans (2011).

It was assigned to Trachodontidae by Nagao (1936) and Nagao (1939); to Euhadrosauria by Weishampel et al. (1993), Casanovas et al. (1999), Horner et al. (2004), Pereda-Suberbiola et al. (2009) and Cruzado-Caballero et al. (2010); to Hadrosauroidea by Prieto-Márquez (2010); to Hadrosauridae by Campione and Evans (2011); and to Hadrosauridae by Lambe (1918), Gilmore (1919), Lambe (1920), Gilmore (1924), Riabinin (1930), Gilmore (1933), Gilmore (1935), Wilfarth (1940), Lull and Wright (1942), Sternberg (1952), Sternberg (1953), Sternberg (1953), Sternberg (1954), Young (1958), Langston (1960), Tatarinov (1964), Kuhn (1966), Russell and Chamney (1967), Brambilla (1972), Taquet (1975), Baird and Horner (1979), McIntosh (1981), Weishampel and Weishampel (1983), Milner and Norman (1984), Powell (1987), Brinkmann (1988), Weishampel and Horner (1990), Dong (1992), Forster and Sereno (1994), Nessov (1995), Bonaparte (1996), Forster (1997), Sereno (1997), Forster (1997), Sereno (1998), Godefroit et al. (1998), Sereno (1999), Norman and Sues (2000), Williamson (2000), Eberth et al. (2001), You et al. (2003), Godefroit et al. (2004), Bolotsky and Godefroit (2004), Ryan and Evans (2005), Prieto-Márques et al. (2006), Prieto-Márquez et al. (2006), Gates et al. (2007), Godefroit et al. (2008), Sues and Averianov (2009), Dalla Vecchia (2009), Prieto-Marquez and Salinas (2010), Prieto-Márquez and Wagner (2010), Ramírez-Velasco et al. (2012), Freedman Fowler and Horner (2015), Tan et al. (2015), Cruzado-Caballero and Powell (2017) and Takasaki et al. (2019).