Within Europe this species is associated with lowland areas of marshy or grassy wetlands, often along river valleys, with small, shallow, often-temporary lakes and ponds. In the former Soviet Union it has been reported from steppe, forest steppe, broad-leaved and mixed leafed coniferous forests, but it also inhabits open landscapes, using drainage channels as pathways for dispersal. At the southeastern margin of its distribution, the species lives in permanent freshwater bodies in river valleys surrounded by an arid saline landscape (solonetz-solonchak complex). It is primarily an aquatic animal living in shallow (less than 50-70 cm depth) stagnant lakes, ponds, pools, swamps, peat bogs, ditches, flooded rice fields and quarries. It may occasionally be found in semi-flowing waters: springs, irrigation channels, rivers and stream pools and the water must generally be clear (for example in the Carpathian region, B. bombina lives in wetlands with clearer water than the congeneric Bombina variegata); however, near the southern margin of the range (such as southeastern Ukraine and the Krasnodar region of South European Russia, out of the Pan Europe assessment region) the species often occurs in waters that have been polluted with industrial and agricultural chemicals such as settling and sedimentation reservoirs, rice fields, polluted ponds in rural and urban areas. The species breeds by larval development in pools with a good growth of sub-aquatic vegetation. Hybrid subpopulations of this species with B. variegata have been recorded (Vörös et al. 2006).

In the European region, this species is found in central and eastern Europe ranging from Denmark, southern Sweden and northern Germany eastwards to the Ural Mountains of Russia, southwards to the Danube floodplain and along the lowlands of the Morava River and its tributaries in Serbia, and to Turkish Thrace. It has been introduced to the United Kingdom (one colony in Surrey), to mainland France (not mapped), and Crimea (Ukraine, not mapped). It is a lowland species that occurs from sea level up to a maximum of 730 m asl (in western Bohemia). The extent of occurrence (EOO) in the EU 27 region is 1,577,192 km².

Out of the European region, the range of this species extends to the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, western parts of Anatolian Türkiye (around Adapazari), western Kazakhstan and the Trans-Ural part of Russia (Chelyabinskaya oblast).

This species is listed on Appendix II of the Bern Convention and on Annexes II and IV of the EU Natural Habitats Directive. It is protected by national legislation in many countries, occurs in many protected areas, and is listed in many national and sub-national Red Data books and lists: Endangered in Czech Republic (Chobot and Něměc 2017), Slovenia (Anonymous 2010), Greece (Legakis and Maragou 2009), Vulnerable in Austria (Gollman 2007), Near Threaten in Croatia (Jelić et al. 2012) and Romania (Botnariuc and Tatole 2005), etc. This species has been successfully reintroduced to some sites in Sweden (Arnold, 2002), as of 2008 there are 10,000 adults in 3,000 breeding ponds. In other parts of this species range, mitigation measures to reduce road kill have been established. There were 71 EC-funded LIFE-projects targeting the species or its habitats: https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/life/publicWebsite/search/get?basicSearchText=bombina+bombina