Presence-absence data on hourly acoustic presence of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) were obtained from passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data collected by five recorders of type Sono.Vault (manufactured by develogic GmbH, Hamburg, Germany) at different positions in Fram Strait between June 2012 and August 2017.Passive acoustic data were collected as part of the Frontiers in Arctic Marine Monitoring (FRAM) observatory in Fram Strait, with two recorders deployed in 2012 (recorders SV1021 and SV1026) and three recorders deployed in 2016 (recorders SV1091, SV1097 and SV1088). Recorders were moored at depths around 800 m and scheduled to record continuously at sample rates of 5,333 Hz (SV1021 and SV1026) and 48,000 Hz (SV1091, SV1097 and SV1088).Bowhead whale vocalizations were automatically detected and classified based on a user-developed call library in the LFDCS ('Low-Frequency Detection and Classification System') software (Baumgartner and Mussoline, 2011), using an SNR ('signal-to-noise ratio') threshold of 8 dB and a Mahalanobis distance threshold of 1.5.To obtain hourly acoustic presence data, all automated detections of bowhead whale vocalizations were visually reviewed by a trained analyst on an hourly basis in spectrograms using Raven Pro 1.5 (Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, USA; window size: 2.5 min; frequency range: 0-1,300 Hz; spectrogram settings: FFT 1,024, overlap 90 %, Hann window).Tables contain information on acoustic presence (indicated by “1”, with at least one verified bowhead whale call present in a given hour) or acoustic absence (indicated by “0”) of bowhead whale vocalizations on an hourly basis for the respective recording period of each recorder.