Abstract. Fishing – especially trawling – is one of the most ubiquitous anthropogenic pressures on marine ecosystems worldwide, yet very few long-term, spatially explicit datasets on trawling effort exist; this greatly hampers our understanding of the medium- to long-term impact of trawling. This important gap is addressed here for the North Sea, a highly productive shelf sea which is also subject to many anthropogenic pressures. For a 31-year time span (1985–2015), we provide a dataset on the spatial distribution of total international otter and beam trawling effort, for all ICES rectangles (0.5° latitude by 1° longitude) of the North Sea. The dataset was largely reconstructed using compiled effort data from 7 fishing effort time-series, each covering shorter time spans and some of the countries fishing the North Sea only. For the years where effort data for particular countries were missing, the series was complemented using estimated (modelled) effort data. This new, long-term and large-scale trawling dataset may serve the wider scientific community, as well as those involved with policy and management, as a valuable information source on fishing pressure in a Large Marine Ecosystem which is heavily impacted, but which simultaneously provides a wealth of ecosystem services to society. The dataset is available on the Cefas Data Hub at: https://doi.org/10.14466/CefasDataHub.61 (Couce et al., 2019).