In software engineering, benchmarks are widely used to evaluate and compare analysis tools’ performance, functionality, and reliability. Despite the prevalence of benchmarks in areas such as databases, machine learning, and programming languages, there is a notable absence of publicly available benchmarks for REST APIs, a cornerstone of modern web-based systems. While existing research papers occasionally employ similar REST APIs in their evaluations, opportunistic API selection hampers comparison. Hence, this paper presents a comprehensive and Public REST API Benchmark (PRAB), to be utilized by REST API researchers for their evaluations. The benchmark contains a total of 60 distinct and unique APIs. First, we conduct a systematic mapping study, to discover available and public REST APIs utilized in the academic literature. Then, by analyzing the resulting APIs, we report their structural characteristics (e.g., routes, query parameters, HTTP methods, authentication). Finally, we provide their documentation (OpenAPI/Postman format) in a publicly accessible GitHub repository, to help with future evaluations of REST APIs.