The Macaroni penguin is a crested penguin with golden-yellow crests found widely on subantarctic islands to the Antarctic peninsula. The Macaroni penguin is often considered a separate species from the Royal penguin, given its unique black facial plumage and wide breeding range. Several recent genetic studies, however, have demonstrated that the Macaroni penguin and Royal penguin are probably incipient. They are the most numerous penguin species. However, widespread declines have been recorded in many populations and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies the Macaroni penguin as vulnerable.We sequenced the genome of an adult Macaroni penguin from Marion Island, Prince Edward Islands (provided by Peter Ryan) to a depth of approximately 109x with short reads from a series of libraries with various insert sizes (250bp-20Kb). The assembled scaffolds of high quality sequences total 1.25Gb, with the contig and scaffold N50 values of 160.01Kb and 13.16Mb respectively. We identified 16311 protein-coding genes.