The vertical distance to channel network index (VDCNI) expresses the vertical height (in meter) between the elevation of a pixel and the nearest channel. It was derived from the national airborne DTM (RGE ALTI ®) at 5 m spatial resolution, which is available from the website of the French National Geographic Institute (IGN) (https://geoservices.ign.fr/), and the GIS layer of the channel network in the national hydrological database https://www.sandre.eaufrance.fr/atlas/srv/fre/catalog.search#/metadata/3b3d3c56-d9b6-4625-a57e-ba054e798274. Dataset includes: 280 GeoTIFF raster files (VDCNI_000.tif) projected in the French Lambert-93 system (EPSG code 2154), each file corresponding to a 50 x 50 km tile. The number indicates the tile of interest ; 1 vector tile index at Google Earth format (tile_index.kmz) showing the location of each tile. This file has been created to facilitate download layer only on area of interest. To reduce storage space and download time, each raster file has been packed at 7-Zip freeware format. A complete description of the dataset can be found in Panhelleux, L., Rapinel, S., Lemercier, B., Gayet, G., Hubert-Moy, L., 2023. A 5 m dataset of digital terrain model derivatives across mainland France. Data in Brief 109369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2023.109369