The Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources (PCCS) is the catalogue of sources detected in the first 15 months of Planck operations, the ``nominal'' mission. It consists of nine single-frequency catalogues of compact sources, both Galactic and extragalactic, detected over the entire sky. The PCCS covers the frequency range 30-857 GHz with higher sensitivity (it is 90% complete at 180 mJy in the best channel) and better angular resolution (from 32.88' to 4.33') than previous all-sky surveys in this frequency band. By construction its reliability is >80% and more than 65% of the sources have been detected in at least two contiguous Planck channels. In this paper we present the construction and validation of the PCCS, its contents and its statistical characterization.
