The banded sugar ant was first described by German entomologist Wilhelm Ferdinand Erichson, who named it "Formica consobrina" in 1842. The holotype specimen is a queen collected from Tasmania, which is now housed in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. "Formica consobrina" was later moved to the genus "Camponotus" as "Camponotus consobrinus", by entomologist Julius Roger in 1863. In 1933, American entomologist William Morton Wheeler described some subspecies and variants of the banded sugar ant. These subspecies were "C. consobrinus lividipes" and "C. consobrinus nigriceps", while the variants were "C. consobrinus var. obniger" and "C. consobrinus var. perthianus". Some of these classifications were short-lived; "C. consobrinus nigriceps" was later revived as a full species in 1934 as "C. nigriceps", while "C. consobrinus lividipes" was synonymised with "C. consobrinus". "C. consobrinus lividipes" was treated as a subspecies for "C. nigriceps" in 1985, now known as "C. nigriceps lividipes". In 1996 "C. consobrinus perthianus" was synonymised with "C. nigriceps", and "C. consobrinus var. obniger" was synonymised with "C. consobrinus".