Secondary amines play a very important role in today's chemical industry owing to their extensive applications in agricultural, pharmaceutical, textile, polymer and in personal care fields [1] Unfortunately, most of the amine synthesis processes at the industrial level are fossil-based and imply economic and environmental problems. However, the het-erogeneously catalyzed reductive amination of lignin-derived phenolics has been recognized as an efficient and ecofriendly method for the synthesis of primary or higher order amines [2] . In this sense, metal-supported catalysts, specifically pal-ladium, and rhodium-based materials, have demonstrated their effectivity to produce secondary amines [ 3 , 4 ]. Therefore, there is a crescent interest in evaluating their roles within the reaction mechanisms by testing different reaction condi-tions and phenolics sources. Nevertheless, there is a lack of experimental data allowing to establish a correlation between the nature of the metal-lic clusters, the operational parameters, and steric effects of alkyl-phenolics with the activity and selectivity to amines. Accordingly, this dataset includes reliable experimental mea-surements on the use of Pd/C and Rh/C as catalysts for the reductive amination of phenols (RAPhs). A complete set of characterization techniques was applied to inspect the structural and textural properties of these materials which will allow its further correlation with the reaction perfor-mance. Therefore, data regarding transmission electron mi-croscopy (TEM), High-resolution transmission electron mi-croscopy (HR-TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with energy dispersive X-Ray analysis (EDX), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and specific surface area (BET) with pore size distri-bution (BJH) are provided here. Furtheremore, experimen-tal data on the catalytic activity (in batch and/or dynamic modes) under different reaction conditions (phenol concen-tration, amine concentration, hydrogen pressure, tempera-ture and alkyl-substituted phenols) are also included in the dataset. The data provided here could support the under-standing on the role of active sites nature (Pd or Rh), the effect of operational parameters and the reactivity order for substituted phenols on the aforementioned reaction. Finally, we have included a sample datasheet which could aid the reader to perform preliminary kinetic analysis using the pro-vided dataset. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)