The native range of the Bigeye chub includes the Lake Ontario and Lake Erie drainages in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan as well as the Ohio River basin from New York to eastern Illinois and south to the Tennessee River drainage, Georgia and Alabama, and the Ozarks of southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and northeastern Oklahoma. There is one record of this species in the Cottonwood River in Kansas. It is absent from the Missouri River drainage. This species in endangered in Illinois.