Freshwater resources are of high societal relevance, and understanding their past variability is vital to water management in the context of ongoing climate change. This study introduces a global gridded monthly reconstruction of runoff covering the period from 1902 to 2014. In situ streamflow observations are used to train a machine learning algorithm that predicts monthly runoff rates based on antecedent precipitation and temperature from an atmospheric reanalysis. The accuracy of this reconstruction is assessed with cross-validation and compared with an independent set of discharge observations for large river basins. The presented dataset agrees on average better with the streamflow observations than an ensemble of 13 state-of-the art global hydrological model runoff simulations. We estimate a global long-term mean runoff of 38 452 km(3)yr(-1) in agreement with previous assessments. The temporal coverage of the reconstruction offers an unprecedented view on large-scale features of runoff variability in regions with limited data coverage, making it an ideal candidate for large-scale hydro-climatic process studies, water resource assessments, and evaluating and refining existing hydrological models. The paper closes with example applications fostering the understanding of global freshwater dynamics, interannual variability, drought propagation and the response of runoff to atmospheric teleconnections. The GRUN dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9228176 (Ghiggi et al., 2019).