Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother, Joan Haring, and father, Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen. He became interested in art at a very young age, spending time with his father producing creative drawings.
His early influences included Walt Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and the Looney Tunes characters in The Bugs Bunny Show.
In his early teenage years, he was involved with the Jesus Movement. He later hitchhiked across the country, selling T-shirts he made featuring the Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon designs. He graduated from Kutztown Area High School in 1976.
He studied commercial art from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art, but eventually lost interest, inspired to focus on his own art after reading The Art Spirit (1923) by Robert Henri.
Haring moved to the Lower East Side of New York in 1978 to study painting at the School of Visual Arts. While attending school he studied semiotics with Bill Beckley and experimented with video and performance art.
Haring first received public attention with his graffiti art in subways, where he created white chalk drawings on black, unused advertisement backboards in the stations. He considered the subways to be his "laboratory," a place where he could experiment and create his artwork and saw the black advertisement paper as a free space and "the perfect place to draw".
