The attached table contains source information and measured concentrations of faecal coliform bacteria (FC), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and total dissolved solids (TDS). These measurements come from published literature and constitute supplementary information for the manuscript mentioned in the reference (in this context, the data was used for model validation and testing). This dataset was used for the project “The world's water quality: A pre-study for a worldwide assessment” for which funding was provided by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and UN-Water.