Type species. Ceratopogon femoratus Meigen, 1818; by original designation.
Diagnosis. Hind femur greatly swollen and armed ventrally in both sexes; fore and mid legs slender and usually unarmed; hind tibia slender; claws of fore and mid legs small and equal; hind legs in female usually with single claw armed with distinct basal tooth; sometimes two equal claws are present as on other legs. Wing usually without color patterns, with two radial cells. One or two seminal capsules (de Meillon & Wirth 1991). Hind basitarsus with complete single row of palisade setae. Paratergite slender. Flagellum without sensilla coecolonica ringed with microtrichia. The genus including 35 extant species is reported from the Holarctic, Afrotropical, Oriental and Australian Regions (Szadziewski 2008, Borkent 2015).