Although climate change is an important factor affecting inland fishes globally, a comprehensive review of how climate change has impacted and will continue to impact inland fishes worldwide does not currently exist. We conducted an extensive, systematic primary literature review to identify peer-reviewed publications with projected and documented examples of climate change impacts on inland fishes globally. Since the mid-1980s, scientists have projected the effects of climate change on inland fishes, and more recently, documentation of climate change impacts on inland fishes has increased. Of the thousands of title and abstracts reviewed, we selected 624 publications for a full text review: 63 of these publications documented an effect of climate change on inland fishes; while 116 publications projected inland fishes’ response to future climate change. The dataset contains each paper citation and details contained in each publication including species studied, location of study, climate change driver, response variable identified, date of study, etc.