Coral reefs are facing increasingly frequent and intense periods of anomalously high temperatures in the Anthropocene. Metabolism scales directly with temperature and we hypothesized that at peak temperatures oxygen consumption may outpace photosynthetic oxygen production in coral holobionts, leading to metabolic challenges, particularly at night when photosynthesis is not occurring. To investigate this we compiled a dataset of metabolic rates extracted from the published literature of respiration and photosynthetic rates of corals and then modelled these rates using a thermal performance curve approach. From this we could estimate the thermal optima (T_opt), activation energy (E) and deactivation energy (E_D) of each metabolic rate. We found a largely consistent trend across latitudinal regions and taxa that net photosynthesis peaks at temperatures lower than respiration, and begins to decline while respiration is still increasing impacting the oxygen budget of the holobiont. This dataset includes the rates per temperature that were extracted for each published article for respiration, net photosynthesis and gross photosynthesis. P:R ratio was calculated from these values, as well as gross or net photosynthesis in the case where one of these rates was missing. The full methods is available in the associated manuscript on how studies were selected. All rates are expressed as μmol O₂ cm^-2 h^-1 except in the case of P:R ratio, which is unitless. We also included pertinent information from each study such as the coral species, location the corals were collected from, the temperature, light conditions, number of replicates, experimental duration where applicable as well as the ramping rate and references.