This dataset is a component of the PAN-Arctic data collection of benthic BIOtas (PANABIO) and has been collated during the Census of Marine Life project Arctic Ocean Diversity (ArcOD; http://www.arcodiv.org/). It contains a total of 15,592 presence records of 431 megabenthic species identified in trawl catches and box corer samples taken at 6,246 stations in various sub-Arctic and Arctic seas at water depths of 0–8,100 m during 755 cruises between 1800 and 2004. The dataset is also available in a PostgreSQL-based data warehouse that can be accessed and queried through an open-access frontend web service at https://critterbase.awi.de/panabio.