Marianne le Roux (SANBI, South Africa) and colleagues have recently published An expert curated global legume checklist improves the accuracy of occurrence, biodiversity and taxonomic data in the journal Scientific Data, published by Nature. This paper describes the work of The Legume Phylogeny Working Group’s Taxonomy Working Group, which has published the first version of a community endorsed global legume checklist. This version of the checklist recognises 772 genera and 22,360 species. The published checklist was compared with the GBIF taxonomic backbone to meaure the impact of the work by the Taxonomy Working Group. A total of 30,456 new legume names were added to the GBIF taxonomic backbone and this enabled more accurate name matching of 61,235 legume occurrences. The legume checklist is available on the Legume Data Portal. It will will serve as a primary source of taxa for biodiversity data platforms and legume-related research.