The whitetip reef shark is widely distributed across the entire Indo-Pacific region. In the Indian Ocean, it is found from northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa to the Red Sea and the Indian subcontinent, including Madagascar, Mauritius, the Comoros, the Aldabra Group, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and the Chagos Archipelago. In the western and central Pacific, it occurs from off southern China, Taiwan, and the Ryukyu Islands, to the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia, to northern Australia, and is also found around numerous islands in Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, as far as Hawaii to the north, and the Pitcairn Islands to the southeast. In the eastern Pacific, it occurs from Costa Rica to Panama, and off the Galápagos Islands. 