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 2,132 presence and/or wet biomass records of 97 macrobenthic taxa (species to genus level) identified in 47 box corer samples taken at 47 stations located in the deep central Arctic Ocean at water depths of 552–4,478 m during a cruise in 1991. 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.