Increasingly frequent marine heatwaves are devastating coral reefs. Corals that survive these extreme events must rapidly recover if they are to withstand subsequent events, and long-term survival in the face of rising ocean temperatures may hinge on recovery capacity and acclimatory gains in heat tolerance over an individual's lifespan. To better understand coral recovery trajectories in the face of successive marine heatwaves, we monitored the responses of bleaching-susceptible and bleaching-resistant individuals of two dominant coral species in Hawaiʻi, Montipora capitata and Porites compressa, over a decade that included three marine heatwaves. This dataset includes the photochemical yield from the standardized short-term (18 hour) heat stress assay.