Abstract As part of the Census of Marine Life's programme of summarising existing knowledge of the oceans, records of all polychaete species collected below 2000 m have been collated from the literature. A total of 3633 records was assembled into a database, revealing that 768 species, 358 of which were new to science, have been reported from the deep sea over the past 200 years. The limitations of the dataset are also discussed. Most of the records were obtained from between 2000 m, the upper depth range of the study, and 4000 m. Analyses of the distribution of records with time reveals that the majority of records were added in the 1960s to early 1980s, coincidental with the introduction of new collecting technologies. However, following this period there was a gap between the collecting of samples and the publication of taxonomic results. To reduce this time lag we are encouraging the use of the world-wide web with new tools and protocols to bring together taxonomists working on different sample sets and allow them to share and compare taxonomic data. As this is the first collation of abyssal polychaetes, the records were analysed to determine whether there is a distinct hadal fauna and whether the fauna of individual trenches was distinctive or a subset of the abyssal plain fauna. The results suggest that the hadal fauna contains few endemic species and that the majority are elements of the abyssal fauna that have extended their bathymetric range.