Fishing – especially trawling – is one of the most ubiquitous anthropogenic pressures on marine ecosystems, yet very few long-term, spatially explicit datasets on trawling effort exist, greatly hampering our understanding of its medium- to long-term impacts. Here we provide a dataset on the spatial distribution of total international otter and beam trawling effort in the North Sea, for the period 1985–2015, reconstructed using compiled effort datasets with data gaps filled by estimations.