This dataset presents benthic foraminiferal δ¹⁸O chronostratigraphies and associated uncertainties for Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Site 980 and 981, based on different tuning targets including LR04 (Lisiecki and Raymo, 2005), LR09 (Lisiecki and Raymo, 2009), CENOGRID (Westerhold et al., 2020) and Probstack (Ahn et al., 2017) and based on manual versus automated tuning techniques (Middleton et al., 2024). The benthic foraminiferal δ¹⁸O record at ODP 980 is based on Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi and Cibicides kullenbergi, and was previously published (McManus et al., 1999; Flower et al., 2000; Oppo et al., 1998). The ODP Site 981 data were measured on benthic foraminifera of the genus Cibicidoides (Raymo et al., 2004). The benthic foraminiferal δ¹⁸O records of ODP Site 980 and 981 were spliced together at ~860 ka (Raymo et al., 2004). Automated tuning is based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-Match-based alignments (Middleton et al., 2024) generated using the automated probabilistic HMM-Match algorithm of Lin et al. (2014). The manual alignments of ODP Site 980/981 were obtained by realigning the original age model tie points (e.g., Raymo et al., 2004) to the benthic foraminiferal LR04 δ¹⁸O stack using the QAnalySeries software (Kotov and Pälike, 2018). The dataset provides the basis for investigating and discussing the uncertainties of benthic foraminiferal δ¹⁸O stratigraphies for conventional manual and automated tuning techniques and evaluate their impact on sedimentary age models over the past 1.8 Myr (Middleton et al., 2024).