This data release presents truth data and benchmark results describing simulation of hydrologic drought events in the conterminous United States. This data release supports a publication (Simeone and others, 2024) which documents drought benchmarking methods and their application to the results of the National Water Model (NWM) version 2.1. Truth data used were observations at U.S. Geological Survey streamgages across the conterminous United States. These data include 4662 U.S. Geological Survey streamgages with a historical period from 1984-2016. The following files are included in this data release: 1) kappa_long_nwm.csv: Benchmark results for the Cohen's kappa evaluation metrics in long table format. 2) spear_bias_dist_long_nwm.csv: Benchmark results for the Spearman's, bias, and distributional evaluation metrics in long table format. 3) ann_eval_long_nwm.csv: Benchmark results for the annual drought evaluation metrics in long table format. 4) streamflow_percentiles_nwm.zip: A zip file containing individual streamflow percentile data files used in this analysis as truth data. 5) input_data_nwm.zip: A zip file with input data for individual streamgages used for our data analysis pipeline as truth data. 6) streamflow_gages_in_study.csv: Metadata information for the 4662 U.S. Geological Survey streamgages contained in the above datasets.