diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst
index b0d2acd9d3490..351ad766d226a 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst
@@ -578,6 +578,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :func:`json_normalize`, fix json_normalize cannot parse metadata fields list type (:issue:`37782`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` where it would error when ``parse_dates`` was set to a list or dictionary with ``engine="pyarrow"`` (:issue:`47961`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv`, with ``engine="pyarrow"`` erroring when specifying a ``dtype`` with ``index_col`` (:issue:`53229`)
+- Bug in :func:`read_csv` was just printing to stderr while it should raise a warning when ``on_bad_line="warn"`` is set (:issue:`54296`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_hdf` not properly closing store after a ``IndexError`` is raised (:issue:`52781`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_html`, style elements were read into DataFrames (:issue:`52197`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_html`, tail texts were removed together with elements containing ``display:none`` style (:issue:`51629`)
diff --git a/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx b/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx
index 6d66e21ce49f5..2b4fa0c7ba6dd 100644
--- a/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx
+++ b/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx
@@ -880,9 +880,11 @@ cdef class TextReader:
 
     cdef _check_tokenize_status(self, int status):
         if self.parser.warn_msg != NULL:
-            print(PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8(
+            decoded_warning_message = PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8(
                 self.parser.warn_msg, strlen(self.parser.warn_msg),
-                self.encoding_errors), file=sys.stderr)
+                self.encoding_errors)
+            warnings.warn(decoded_warning_message, ParserWarning,
+                          stacklevel=find_stack_level())
             free(self.parser.warn_msg)
             self.parser.warn_msg = NULL