Ajivika communities were most firmly rooted in the eastern Gangetic plain, especially in Magadha, corresponding to modern Bihar. This region is described as their most important center, the place where the tradition originated and flourished, and where it shared the religious landscape with early Buddhism and Jainism. Within Magadha, cities such as Rajagriha (Rajgir) and the broader urban milieu of that kingdom served as focal points of Ajivika activity. More generally, eastern India along the Gangetic plain formed the heartland in which Ajivika teachers moved, taught, and debated, shaping a distinctive deterministic vision of spiritual life amid other renunciant movements.

Beyond Magadha, Ajivika influence extended into neighboring northern regions, particularly areas that now correspond to parts of Uttar Pradesh. Shravasti is singled out as a significant northern center, remembered in connection with the life and death of the Ajivika leader Gosala Makkhaliputta. This northern presence shows that Ajivika ascetics were active in the same circuits of towns and monastic parks where Buddhist and Jain communities also gathered. The shared geography suggests a vibrant, competitive spiritual environment in which seekers could encounter sharply contrasting paths while walking the same roads.

Over time, Ajivika presence is also attested in the south, especially in regions that correspond to present-day Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, with some extension into parts of Andhra Pradesh and the Deccan plateau. These southern and Deccan centers indicate that the Ajivika path did not remain confined to its original Gangetic cradle but spread along the great cultural and trade routes into peninsular India. In these areas, inscriptions, literary references, and the memory of Ajivika communities point to a continued, if eventually waning, religious presence. Taken together, the northern heartland and the southern extensions reveal a tradition that once stretched from the eastern Gangetic plain down into the Deccan, sharing space with other renunciant orders while maintaining its own austere and deterministic spiritual vision.