Bearded Seals have a patchy circumpolar distribution throughout much of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, south of 85ºN (Kelly 1988). A disjunct population inhabits the Sea of Okhotsk, ranging south to Hokkaido, Japan (Rice 1998). Bearded Seals reach the southern Bering Sea and Bristol Bay to the limit of seasonally ice covered waters regularly (Kelly 1988). They also occupy all of Hudson Bay, are found throughout much of the eastern Canadian Archipelago, both coasts of Greenland and south to southern Labrador. They can also be found along the north shore of Iceland, within the Svalbard Archipelago and across much of the north within the Russian Federation (Kovacs 2002). Bearded Seal vagrants have been reported from many locations outside the Arctic including Portugal in the eastern North Atlantic (van Bree 2000), the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, northern Newfoundland, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the western North Atlantic (Gosselin 1994).

The ranges of the two putative subspecies are divided near the central Canadian Arctic in the West and the Laptev Sea in the East, with the Atlantic subspecies barbatus occurring from the central Canadian Arctic east to the central Eurasian Arctic and the Pacific subspecies nauticus occurring from the Laptev Sea east to the central Canadian Arctic, including animals in the Sea of Okhotsk (Rice 1998). Geographical variation does exist in the calls of Bearded Seals across their range, suggesting some population substructure (Risch et al. 2007).