Tropical cyclones (TCs) pose a major risk to societies worldwide. While data on observed cyclones tracks (location of the center) and wind speeds is publicly available these data sets do not contain information about the spatial extent of the storm and people or assets exposed. Here, we apply a simplified wind field model to estimate all areas (grid cells) exposed to wind speeds above 34 knots. Based on available spatially-explicit data on population densities and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) we estimate 1) the number of people and 2) the sum of assets exposed to above tropical storm force wind speeds for temporal changes in historical distribution of population and assets (TCE-hist) and assuming fixed 2015 patterns (TCE-2015). The associated spatially-explicit exposure data (TCE-DAT) covers the period 1950 to 2015. It is considered key information to 1) assess the contribution of climatological versus socio-economic drivers of changes in exposure to tropical cyclones, 2) estimate changes in vulnerability from the difference in exposure and reported damages and calibrate associated damage functions, and 3) build improved exposure-based predictors to estimate higher-level societal impacts such as long-term effects on GDP, employment, or migration. We validate the adequateness of our methodology by comparing our exposure estimate to estimated exposure obtained from reported wind fields available since 1988 for the United States. We expect that the free availability of the underlying model and TCE-DAT will make research on tropical cyclone risks more accessible to non-experts and stakeholders. Files included in the zip folder: (1) TCE-DAT_single_events_historical.zip: Zipped archive containing 2707 files with exposed population and assets by grid cell using historical socio-economic exposure estimates.(2) TCE-DAT_single_events_2015.zip: Zipped archive containing 2713 files with exposed population and assets by grid cell using fixed socio-economic exposure at 2015 values.(3) Data-description_TCE-DAT_2017.008.pdf: full description of the data set including information on data sources and the description of variables/ data columns Additional information on each TC event in the zipped archive (e.g. TC name, NatCatSERVICE_ID, genesis_basin, aggregated exposure estimates by country) are available in the exposure data sets aggregated on country-event level (see Geiger et al., 2017; http://doi.org/10.5880/pik.2017.005 for details).