The present dataset is part of the published scientific paper Zhao C, Weng Q, Hersperger A M. Characterizing the 3-D urban morphology transformation to understand urban-form dynamics: a case study of Austin, Texas, USA. Landscape and urban planning, 2020, 203:103881. The overall objective of this paper is to understand urban form dynamics in the Austin metropolitan area for the periods 2006–2011 and 2011–2016. The study also aims to understand to what extent the changes in the built environment (in terms of ‘efficient growth’ versus ‘inefficient growth’) from the 1990s to 2016 in the Austin metropolitan area corresponded with ‘compact and efficient growth’ planning policy documents. The UMT distribution can be found in the paper. The area of transitioning UMT was provided in Table 2 and Table 3 can be found in the Appendix of the paper. A protocol was developed to perform the content analysis of the strategic plans and gather the data. The detailed list of protocol items can be found in Appendix B of the paper. This study demonstrates the advantage of applying Lidar data to characterize 3-D urban morphology type (UMT) transition and understand its dynamics, which helps develop a comprehensive understanding of the urbanization process and provides a tool for planning intentions and policies evaluation on urban development over time. The UMT maps can be found in Appendix A of the paper. The Lidar point datasets and the 30 × 30 m National Land Cover Database (NLCD) are the two main data sources of UMT mapping. Lidar datasets were gathered from different projects that had been conducted and collected by state agencies and other organizations between 2007 and 2017. Table A1 in the appendix in the paper shows the accuracies and acquisition parameters of the Lidar projects from 2007 to 2017. Land use/cover dynamics in Austin metropolitan area dataset provides Land use/cover patterns in the years 1992, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016 with a spatial resolution of 30 meters. Since NLCD 1992 used a different classification system for the urban land classes, we first reclassified the NLCD 1992 using a customized Arcpy package.