The formulation of statistical physics using light‐front quantization, instead of conventional equal‐time boundary conditions, has important advantages for describing relativistic statistical systems, such as heavy ion collisions. We develop light‐front field theory at finite temperature and density with special attention to Quantum Chromodynamics. We construct the most general form of the statistical operator allowed by the Poincare algebra and introduce the chemical potential in a covariant way. In light‐front quantization, the Green’s functions of a quark in a medium can be defined in terms of just 2‐component spinors and does not lead to doublers in the transverse directions. A seminal property of light‐front Green’s functions is that they are related to parton densities in coordinate space. Namely, the diagonal and off‐diagonal parton distributions measured in hard scattering experiments can be interpreted as light‐front density matrices.