The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This dataset provides underwater temperature data recorded every fifteen minutes from 2009 to 2015 at five off-shore coral reefs in the Florida Keys, USA. From northeast to southwest, these sites are Fowey Rocks (Biscayne National Park), Molasses Reef (Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, FKNMS), Crocker Reef (FKNMS), Sombrero Reef (FKNMS), and Pulaski Shoal (Dry Tortugas National Park). A portion of the dataset included here was interpreted in conjunction with coral and algal calcification rates in Kuffner et al. (2013).