Modern marine pollen records can be interpreted reliably only when the main source-to-sink processes between terrestrial vegetation, rivers, and marine depocentres are documented by comparable modern data. Here, we present and quality-assess a paired marine-fluvial pollen dataset for the Bohai Sea, China, consisting of 430 marine surface-sediment samples and 104 fluvial surface-sediment samples from 16 major inflowing rivers. The dataset includes sample coordinates, water depth for marine stations, river and regional identifiers, pollen and spore counts, pollen concentrations, and grain-size parameters. In total, 104 pollen and spore morphotypes were identified. Marine assemblages are dominated by arboreal pollen, especially <em>Pinus</em> (mean 59 %), whereas nearshore and river-influenced settings contain higher proportions of herbaceous taxa, particularly Chenopodiaceae/Amaranthaceae-type (mean 14 %), <em>Artemisia</em>, and Poaceae. Redundancy analysis after variance-inflation-factor screening indicates that water depth is the strongest retained predictor of marine pollen composition (λ1/λ2 = 0.303), followed by geographic position and sediment texture. In river samples, geographic position, water discharge, and pollen concentration together explain 20.53 % of the compositional variance. Along the 0–35 m depth interval, arboreal pollen and <em>Pinus</em> increase with water depth, whereas herbaceous taxa decrease, providing an internally consistent modern analogue for distinguishing nearshore fluvial influence from more distal aeolian influence. The dataset is intended primarily as a reusable calibration and quality-assessment resource for palaeoenvironmental studies in the Bohai-Yellow Sea region. The archived data are available at the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (TPDC; Li et al., 2026; <a href="https://doi.org/10.11888/Paleoenv.tpdc.303516" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://doi.org/10.11888/Paleoenv.tpdc.303516</a>).