Wolfgang was born around 934 to a noble Alemannian-Swabian family at Pfullingen in Swabia. Educated at the Abbey of Reichenau on Lake Constance and at the cathedral school of Würzburg, he became a teacher and later monk at the Abbey of Einsiedeln in Switzerland under St. Gregory of Einsiedeln.
Around 972, the new Holy Roman Emperor Otto II summoned Wolfgang to be consecrated Bishop of Regensburg — the principal Bavarian Catholic see — succeeding the deposed Michael. For the next twenty-two years (972–994), Wolfgang undertook the major Catholic reform of Bavaria.
His most consequential institutional act was the 975 separation of the Bohemian diocese of Prague from the over-large Bavarian Diocese of Regensburg — creating the autonomous Bohemian (Czech) Catholic ecclesiastical structure that would become the Catholic Czech national-church identity (St. Adalbert of Prague, consecrated 982, was the second Bishop of the new Prague see).
He undertook missionary work among the Hungarian Magyars (in parallel to St. Adalbert's mission), and served as tutor of the young Emperor St. Henry II — placing him in the central Ottonian Catholic episcopal-imperial circle.
He established the Abbey of St. Emmeram at Regensburg as a reform-centre and undertook ascetic retreats to a hermitage on the shore of Lake Abersee in the Salzkammergut of Upper Austria — the lake and the town that grew up at the hermitage are named for him today as Wolfgangsee and St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut, one of the principal pilgrim destinations of Austrian Catholicism.
He died at Pupping near Linz on October 31, 994, on a pastoral visitation journey; his body was returned to Regensburg and buried at the Abbey of St. Emmeram, where his shrine remains in active Catholic veneration to the present day.