thumb|Brown-headed barbet in Chandigarh

The brown-headed barbet (Psilopogon zeylanicus) is an Asian barbet species native to the Indian subcontinent, where it inhabits tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests.

Taxonomy

The brown-headed barbet was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the puffbirds in the genus Bucco and coined the binomial name Bucco zeylanicus. Gmelin based his description on the "yellow cheeked barbet" that had been described and illustrated in 1776 by the naturalist Peter Brown from a specimen collected in Sri Lanka. The brown-headed barbet is now one of 32 barbets placed in the genus Psilopogon that was introduced in 1836 by Salomon Müller.

Three subspecies are recognised: