Thanks to Stewart Springer’s research, we know a great deal of exact information about the sandbar shark. In addition to studying the records of commercial fishing operations, Springer assembled data over twenty-five years and examined several thousand sandbar sharks.

Its distribution changes with the seasons and Springer discovered a very distinct migratory pattern coupled with somewhat unusual behavior. During the summer in North America, along the western Atlantic, the sandbar shark can generally be found in the coastal waters from around Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to the northern coast of Venezuela. In the north Atlantic, during the winter, it is generally found only in the warmer waters near the Carolinas, the southern tip of Florida and on down into the Gulf of Mexico. In March to early August, when the females are ready to give birth, the sexes segregate themselves. The nursery grounds of the north Atlantic population are in the bays and estuaries of the east coast of the United States, on the continental shelf from Cape Cod to Cape Kennedy. A major nursery ground is Delaware Bay. When the young are about to be born, the males move to deeper waters, leaving the females in these nursery or "pupping" grounds. This is possibly due to the presence of bull sharks in this area at the same time and because the pups are so small that they would be eaten by the adult male sandbar sharks. The newborn pups stay in the nursery areas until cooler weather, when they are large enough to move off-shore and begin their migration south for the winter.