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 176 presence records of 38 macrobenthic taxa (species to genus level) identified in 47 van Veen grab samples taken at 47 stations located in the Beaufort Sea at water depths of 4–22 m during four cruises between 1985 and 1988. 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.