The pan-Arctic Permafrost-Region Lake-DOC version1 database contains surface water samples of lakes in the permafrost regions of Alaska (49.3 %), Canada (24.2 %), Greenland (3.2 %) and Siberia (23.3 %). It includes concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) for each of the 1,833 lakes of our synthesis dataset. The lakes of the dataset are located in permafrost regions between 59.2° and 82.5° northern latitude and were sampled between the years 1979 and 2017. We synthesised published datasets and unpublished samples from the author team.We assigned the following information to each lake using existing secondary environmental parameter datasets:- permafrost zone (Brown et al., 1997; Jorgenson et al., 2008),- ecoregion (Olson et al., 2004),- deposit type (Fulton, 1995; Nielsen, 2010; Petrov et al., 2014; Strauss et al., 2016),- ground ice content (Brown et al., 1997; Jorgenson et al., 2008), and- soil organic carbon content (Hugelius et al., 2014).The lakes cover the full range of permafrost extent from the isolated permafrost to continuous permafrost zone. They are located in the boreal forest ecoregion, in the tundra ecoregion and in the boreal-tundra transition zone. For a regionalization we subdivided the data into 13 study areas (22 sites).