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 1,526 abundance records of 159 macrobenthic polychaete taxa (species and genus level) identified in 70 grab samples taken at 70 stations located in the Beaufort Sea at water depths of 4–3,010 m during three cruises in 1971, 1972 and 1976. 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.