Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere – the “global carbon budget” – is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO₂ emissions (E_FF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land use change (E_LUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land use and land use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO₂ concentration is measured directly and its growth rate (G_ATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO₂ sink (S_OCEAN) and terrestrial CO₂ sink (S_LAND) are estimated with global process models constrained by observations. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (B_IM), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the last decade available (2009–2018), E_FF was 9.5±0.5 GtC yr⁻¹, E_LUC 1.5±0.7 GtC yr⁻¹, G_ATM 4.9±0.02 GtC yr⁻¹ (2.3±0.01 ppm yr⁻¹), S_OCEAN 2.5±0.6 GtC yr⁻¹, and S_LAND 3.2±0.6 GtC yr⁻¹, with a budget imbalance B_IM of 0.4 GtC yr⁻¹ indicating overestimated emissions and/or underestimated sinks. For the year 2018 alone, the growth in E_FF was about 2.1 % and fossil emissions increased to 10.0±0.5 GtC yr⁻¹, reaching 10 GtC yr⁻¹ for the first time in history, E_LUC was 1.5±0.7 GtC yr⁻¹, for total anthropogenic CO₂ emissions of 11.5±0.9 GtC yr⁻¹ (42.5±3.3 GtCO₂). Also for 2018, G_ATM was 5.1±0.2 GtC yr⁻¹ (2.4±0.1 ppm yr⁻¹), S_OCEAN was 2.6±0.6 GtC yr⁻¹, and S_LAND was 3.5±0.7 GtC yr⁻¹, with a B_IM of 0.3 GtC. The global atmospheric CO₂ concentration reached 407.38±0.1 ppm averaged over 2018. For 2019, preliminary data for the first 6–10 months indicate a reduced growth in E_FF of +0.6 % (range of −0.2 % to 1.5 %) based on national emissions projections for China, the USA, the EU, and India and projections of gross domestic product corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the economy for the rest of the world. Overall, the mean and trend in the five components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2018, but discrepancies of up to 1 GtC yr⁻¹ persist for the representation of semi-decadal variability in CO₂ fluxes. A detailed comparison among individual estimates and the introduction of a broad range of observations shows (1) no consensus in the mean and trend in land use change emissions over the last decade, (2) a persistent low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO₂ flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) an apparent underestimation of the CO₂ variability by ocean models outside the tropics. This living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new global carbon budget and the progress in understanding of the global carbon cycle compared with previous publications of this data set (Le Quéré et al., 2018a, b, 2016, 2015a, b, 2014, 2013). The data generated by this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/gcp-2019 (Friedlingstein et al., 2019).