We developed a 30 m dataset to characterize the annual coverage of glacial lakes in High Mountain Asia (HMA) from 2008 to 2017. Our results show that proglacial lakes are a main contributor to recent lake evolution in HMA, accounting for 62.87 % (56.67 km²) of the total area increase. Regional geographic variability of debris cover, together with trends in warming and precipitation over the past few decades, largely explains the current distribution of supra- and proglacial lake area.