Catalytic peptides are low cost biomolecules able to catalyse chemical reactions such as ester hydrolysis. This dataset provides a list of catalytic peptides currently reported in literature. Several parameters were evaluated, including sequence length, composition, net charge, isoelectric point, hydrophobicity, self-assembly propensity and mechanism of catalysis. Along with the analysis of physico-chemical properties, the SMILES representation for each sequence was generated to provide an easy-to-use means of training machine learning models. This offers a unique opportunity for the development and validation of proof-of-concept predictive models. Being a reliable manually curated dataset, it also enables the benchmark for comparison of new models or models trained on automatically gathered peptide-oriented datasets. Moreover, the dataset provides an insight in the currently developed catalytic mechanisms and can be used as the foundation for the development of next-generation peptide-based catalysts.