A total of 15,259 SWCCs from 2,702 sites were assembled from published literature and other sources, standardized, and quality-checked to obtain global database of soil hydraulic properties (GSHP). The GSHP database covers most regions across the globe, with the highest number of curves from North America followed by Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, Australia/Oceania. In addition to SWCCs, other soil variables such as soil texture (12,233 measurements), bulk density (15,125 measurements), and soil organic carbon (2,255 measurements) are also listed in the database. The R code used for this study is available here: https://github.com/ETHZ-repositories/GSHP-database For more details / to cite this dataset please use: Gupta, S., Papritz, A., Lehmann, P., Hengl, T., Bonetti, S., and Or, D., (2022): Global Soil Hydraulic Properties dataset based on legacy site observations and robust parameterization”. Manuscript accepted to Scientific Data. Examples of using the GSHP database to generate van Genuchten parameters maps can be found in 10.5281/zenodo.6343570. Please Note: In one dataset within this collection (source_db == Florida_database), the reported values of saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat) are in cm/hr and should be multiplied by 24 to convert them to cm/day. This issue affects only this specific dataset. A corrected version of the dataset, including the updated Table 5 Ksat values in the paper, will be provided in the coming days. Description of the files: The datasets in this repository include: WRC_dataset_surya_et_al_2021_final provides a global compilation of soil hydraulic properties and the information described in the Readme_GSHP file. Dataset_notebook shows the graphical representation of the GSHP database. The study was supported by ETH Zurich (Grant ETH-18 18-1).